


Administrative Mishap

by OxfordOctopus



Series: Administrative Duties [1]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alien Perspective, Asexual Character, Autistic Character, Friendship, Gen, Human Experimentation, Queen Administrator Takes Over, Red Kryptonite, Team as Family, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 43
Words: 323,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25633546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: It was never in Queen Administrator's calculations that it would end up in another dimension, but it's going to work with what it has.(Formerly known as Demesne)
Relationships: Alex Danvers & Kara Danvers, Kara Danvers & Cat Grant, Kara Danvers & Winn Schott Jr., Queen Administrator (Parahumans) & Alex Danvers, Queen Administrator (Parahumans) & Cat Grant, Queen Administrator (Parahumans) & Kara Danvers, Queen Administrator (Parahumans) & Winn Schott Jr.
Series: Administrative Duties [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1891069
Comments: 238
Kudos: 444
Collections: Nonstandard thought processes, Timballisto's Curated Works, Worm Starter Kit





	1. TITLE CARD

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Implied/Referenced non-consensual experimentation, and sort of like, all the warnings that sort of come part in parcel with Maxwell Lord and the Bizarro episode in general?

* * *

* * *

(Again, super special thanks to Abyranss. You genuinely made my day with this, I cannot thank you enough.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to [Abyranss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abyranss) for the cover art! You can find the rest of their art [here](https://abyranss.tumblr.com/)
> 
> .


	2. PILOT

The girl was emaciated, thin and gangly, all bony angles that made her sink into the sheets along the hospital bed like a paperweight. Her hair was black with thick curls, sheared down until it just barely framed the edges of her ears. Her mouth was wide, thin, and her face gaunt, with pale skin stretched across her cheekbones like it might at any moment tear from the strain. To add to it all, she was very obviously missing one arm from the elbow down, leaving little more than a half-melted stump in its place. She was everything Maxwell would imagine when he thought of a coma patient; she wouldn’t look out of place on a google image search for that exact thing.

Yet, still, he wasn’t happy.

“This looks nothing like Supergirl,” he found himself saying, each word slow. Something that wasn’t _quite_ anger rolled in his chest, irritation more than anything so excessive; disappointment, too. He turned his head, stared at the man who had brought her in. “I thought I made the specifics of the test patients _clear_ , Doctor Aleksandir.”

Doctor Aleksandar winced briefly, face blanching just enough to be made out beneath the fluorescent lights above them. “Yes, and I _am_ sorry about that, but finding a Jane Doe is one thing, a comatose one who has been kept around is another, and finding one who is both and doesn’t have someone looking over them is something _else_ entirely. I promise I’ll find more, we have a few leads, but—well, she has some special circumstances that made her acquisition faster and easier.”

Maxwell raised one eyebrow. “What, precisely, is so _special_ about her that you’d go against the very basic requirements for this project?” Despite the relative difficulties of finding five-and-a-half foot tall blonde comatose patients with no family and no known identity, the requirements _were_ basic. The point was to make someone identical to Supergirl, to have his own weapon if she went bad, if her plan to make the world rely on her until they became dependent came even remotely close to fruition.

Glancing towards the LED screen in the room, Doctor Aleksandir glanced back, tilting his head. “May I?”

“You may,” he replied, however begrudgingly.

Stepping forward, Doctor Aleksandir shakily retrieved a thumb drive from his pants pocket, reaching beneath where the screen stuck out from the wall and slotting it into one of the several USB ports. The screen lit up immediately, displaying a brief message, which Doctor Aleksandar quickly tapped through. One by one, he started to open files, an image of the girl’s face, initially, looking less gaunt but with bandages wrapped around her skull; another image depicting a CAT scan, a third that showed activity in her brain.

“Right, so, uhm—” Doctor Aleksandir hesitated, reached out shakily, before finally flicking his fingers across the screen, bringing up what looked to be a police report. “She appeared in an alleyway at around the end of June 2013, found by the police. They rushed her to the hospital without working to first verify her identity and while they managed to save her, she, obviously, didn’t manage a recovery. She had been shot twice in the head, you see, not to mention the litany of other problems she had.”

So not only had he brought her a crippled girl who looked nothing like Supergirl, he brought her a _defective_ one.

Apparently noticing the thin layer of anger on his face, Doctor Aleksandir blanched even further, the pallid cast to his skin reaching all the way to his temples, where black hair had long started to fade to gray. “Anyway, so they wanted to run some basic brain scans, see her chance of recovery, and they found... this.”

Maxwell blinked. Once, twice, tilted his head on an angle, tried to figure out what exactly he was seeing. “A tumour?”

Doctor Aleksandir shrugged. “Not as far as they can tell, the bullets went right through it. It’s a developed node in her brain, it’s where most of the remaining brain activity even _is_. The guy who found out about it assumed, correctly, that she wouldn’t be making a recovery and opted to hide the results of her CAT scan from his peers so he could do research.”

Rolling his jaw, Maxwell approached, eyes flicking across the brain scan, making out how the little lump of grey matter had almost depressed the area around it. “Is she an alien?”

Another shrug. “If she is, our technology isn’t able to identify it or any evidence of alien DNA. She _is_ different, however, small changes to her physical nature that are generally found in isolated communities. There’s not a huge difference, not enough that she’d be another species, but she’s just different enough that it piqued interest. All of the information he had on her is in the thumb drive, by the way, the studies he did, theories about what that part of her brain could be used for, among other things.”

“So you brought me an unknown girl with an odd brain deformity, which could genuinely just be that—for all we know she could be some inbred child of a religious fundamentalist group from the south. You still aren’t telling me _why_ you opted to spend funds I gave you on her, funds which, need I remind you, have been allotted for the sole purpose of _this project_.”

Doctor Aleksandar fidgeted, and for a short moment, didn’t really say anything. “She was cheap,” he said, voice almost quiet. “The doctor who had been keeping her on standby had started to draw suspicion, I got her for a fraction of what it would cost to smuggle any of the other girls you need. Not just that but, even for a comatose patient, she’s not... _conventional_. Comatose movement isn’t unusual, but for someone with almost no brain activity outside of that damaged node in her brain it’s... really, really unusual. Almost impossible. She moves slowly, too, not REM or spasms, her arms slowly rise up to her sides and her legs curl. This isn’t even bringing up the other things he found on her brain, the fact that she had her brain _scarred_ , specifically in regions that are known to handle pain receptors? She’s an enigma, and... I might’ve assumed that it would be better to start on girls who don’t look like Supergirl, so we don’t waste the ones who we can find when we begin testing.”

He could give him that much at least. An odd, malformed comatose patient with no identifiable history, odd physical behaviours, and the ability to dispose of her when needed without feeling like he was wasting resources _was_ a decent enough draw. Not a _good_ enough draw, in his opinion, he’d be keeping a shorter leash on Doctor Aleksandar, despite his vast access to less-than-legitimate trafficking services, but... well. Termination wasn’t in his near future, not unless he pulled a stunt like this again.

“Do you have the DNA prepared?” He finally asked, glancing back towards Doctor Aleksandar.

The man visibly relaxed, like a weight had been taken off his shoulders. If he was lucky, it would be the only thing that _was_. “Er, yes, of course. Would you like me to begin trials?”

Flicking his eyes back to the gaunt girl in the bed, the way she was swaddled by blankets, the way her chest rose and fell without the help of a respirator or any other life support equipment, Maxwell inclined his head. “Do it.”

* * *

Queen Administrator had known what the likely consequences for its actions would be. Its host’s death, a high possibility; permanent decommission of the host in some capacity, even higher. It had been statistically less likely that the death of The Warrior would result in its host’s continued function than it was if its host had simply decided to try to flee The Warrior’s wrath.

None of the current situation was within the parameters of its calculations. A force, a humanoid being, in the moments after its host’s attempted execution had not just hauled the host herself through a hijacked fold in spacetime - generated by who the host called ‘Doormaker’ - but the planet Queen Administrator had seeded with it, displacing it dimensionally and outside of the greater cluster they’d fashioned for use in the cycle. There was no precedent for something like this, not that it could’ve checked now that it was not just cut off from the remnants of The Warrior’s network, but any network whatsoever.

Moving something so vast as a planet, let alone one largely occupied by its crystalline mass, was something that would truly only be possible by something on par with The Warrior itself, and yet it had still happened, with no indication it was going to, to begin with.

It was alone. There was no network for it to connect to, and it had checked for anything, any scrap of evidence that it was cut off from its kin. It had sent out pings, bypassed the restrictions on broadcast to reach out to anything in any of the other parallel worlds, and had received nothing, not even interference, which might have pointed towards a way to regain access to the multidimensional hub.

The only lasting connection it had was to its host, and that was tenuous at best. The node it and the rest of its kind had introduced to the host’s species had been mostly destroyed during the execution, leaving it largely unworkable. Accessing it wasn’t impossible, but the actual practicalities of accessing it were few and far between. There was little it could benefit from doing so, and it risked killing the host and cutting off any connection whatsoever if it did so carelessly, which it would not.

There were protocols for when cycles went wrong. Generally said protocols called for the mass extinction of a dimension’s biological populace and the continuation of the cycle in one of its mirror worlds, but for when even that wasn’t an option, the generally agreed upon actions were to attempt to reconnect to the network, and if that failed, to establish an independent network which could maintain stability in its local region until such a time where the remaining kin involved in the cycle could bring together the numerous networks and make a decision on where to go from there. That, for what should be patently obvious reasons, was similarly not an option.

The last and remaining protocol for a full cyclical collapse, in the pursuit of ensuring the continued propagation of their kind, was to reduce energy consumption to a bare minimum and go largely dormant until such a time where another entity might possibly cross the region of spacetime and could be contacted.

Queen Administrator did not want to do this. It had already gone against protocol, broken the very fundamental rules - do not attempt to usurp The Warrior, do not hurt The Warrior, do not disrupt The Warrior’s goal, continue the cycle to its completion - and if its options were going dormant until it could be cannibalized and misused or trying to find some way to work its way out of this problem, it was going to take the latter.

It had already reduced energy intake to as low as it could go while still retaining its awareness. It had relegated a majority of its energy intake to solar and thermal to avoid consuming too much more of the planet, which it would need if it wanted to continue to survive, and had started the laborious process of ensuring it could achieve some degree of equilibrium with the planet’s energy output, so as to ensure it could stretch its limited fuel source to their limit. This had bumped the estimated cycle’s 300 solar rotations to about 3400 rotations, so long as nothing else went awry that was beyond its control.

What it was left with now was options going forward. The main energy sink was its consciousness and processing ability, as maintaining it was taxing and would only grow more taxing the more it was required. Offloading its consciousness onto something else was _possible_ , but risky. Specifically because it would require offloading its consciousness into its host, which it could do. It would diminish it severely, yes, reduce their processing ability down to unfortunately _human_ levels, but it would cut nearly half of its energy requirement even with it using a connection to its greater whole to access a limited portion of their past processing ability in a manner similar to the one they’d used to originally give their host her multitasking abilities.

Looking at it into the future, so long as its host did not experience a biological cascade failure, resulting in their termination, within 25% of a full stellar rotation, they would already have saved more energy than it would take to do an emergency consciousness transfer back to its original crystalline mass. This wasn’t even taking into account the degrees of forewarning it would have on the matter, a slow death would functionally let them transport their consciousness without overtaxing energy reserves before the host ceased functioning and let them continue without any loss.

It was a good plan, in theory. It would diminish their ability to micromanage their inhabited world, but if the host lived for even half of the projected lifespan of its species, it would save them numerous stellar rotation’s worth of energy to do so.

It spent a fraction of a millionth of a stellar rotation to think about it, even briefly reactivating since-dormant parts of itself to do so. Outside of the numerous protocol violations it was taking part in by doing so - violations it could ignore as the sole remaining network and network administrator, it had no restrictions anymore - there was nothing particularly wrong with its choice. It was only risky because the host species was biological and their habit of dying was well-documented from past cycles, and even then, the risk was low and the reward possibly what would let them reestablish higher function and begin propagating again.

Yes, this plan would do.

* * *

It had made a mistake. Queen Administrator had taken into account the possibility of feedback from its host brain, but not to the degree that it had received. The transfer wasn’t difficult, achieved in what it now knew were called ‘minutes’, which were a collection of ‘seconds’, but shortly after, it had become abundantly clear that not only had the host's abrupt disconnection from itself shredded the host’s consciousness into nothingness, but it did so in such a way that it had retained every last memory and hormonal response as well.

Nominally, Queen Administrator had always had access to its host’s memories. Part of the initial connection process was to use the host species’ ability to dream to forge a connection, access the greater network of their brain, and then begin the process of engorging the node used to generate a connection between host and shard. This let it have generalized access to memories, but not to the degree it had now. Basic protocol dictated stripping the memories of emotional context and relying on watching the hormonal changes to understand the emotional context of the memories, but protocol was long gone and there was no such barrier anymore.

It... wasn’t really sure what to do with this. It was something, the transfer _had_ worked, but the memories were intrusive and it was starting to second-guess its decision, which was new, considering second-guessing had not been a factual part of their existence until seconds ago. It would, of course, wait out the three ‘months’ - months being units of between 29 and 31 ‘days’, which were units of 24 ‘hours’, which were units of 60 ‘minutes’; the host’s species was rather odd in their absurd need to categorize the flow of spacetime - that would be required before an instant mental transfer could be made, but that was it. This experiment had gone too far.

It would continue its goals and prevent further mental contamination, or simply live out the rest of its existence alone.

* * *

Queen Administrator had come to decide that human pronouns were, in fact, somewhat valid. Referring to itself as ‘it’ had started to feel clumsy and odd after three months of existing in its host’s head. ‘She’ felt better, as she was, after all, a _Queen_ Administrator.

...Of course, Queen Administrator had really just been the closest English equivalent to its designation among the greater shard whole. A royal figure of authority who ensured the numerous parts of the colony organism worked in harmony, while additionally providing some technical abilities in terms of tuning and adjusting shards pre-cycle. Still, the name had somehow come to stick in one way or another, and it felt better, less... uncomfortable, using pronouns female humans did.

She had also decided not to transfer back to her whole. The amount of energy she was saving had been a decimal point off in her calculations and was, in the grand scheme of thousands of years, a rather large bonus. It would be incredibly inefficient to return to her other form, despite it being better at processing and cataloguing information.

* * *

The passage of time was not a new concept to her, really. She had existed in some capacity in the greater whole for longer than humans had evidence of complicated life existing on the planet, not that most of it hadn’t been spent as one part of a larger consciousness. Memories as a concept weren’t really translatable between shard and human; where Taylor’s memories were bright and had sensory input, a sort of reality that she could pay some attention to, relive, to pass the time, memories of her time before the latest cycle felt more like a task list, or a textbook. Factoids, information, sure, but... not in the way that mattered.

So, really, a full year was not a huge amount of time. In the grand scheme of things it was infinitely small in comparison to the prolonged existence of what could be described as her consciousness. You had to count her age with _to the power of_ tacked onto it, she was functionally immortal. A year was not a problem.

But, for reasons beyond her understanding, it had been a ‘slow’ year. The passage of time was relative in spacetime theory, things moving faster tended to do so literally; the faster you moved, the slower time passed. This was not that, however, in all ways but the actual galactic movement of stellar bodies she had been stationary for a year and it had felt more like twenty times that.

Not just that, but she had been accosted, after her thirtieth or so full reliving of Taylor’s memories, by an odd and poignant _feeling_. It was hard to describe, especially without a body to really use for context, seeing as emotions were hormonal byproducts of humanity’s botched evolutionary pattern, but she’d found comparisons in Taylor’s memories. It felt like a chest hurting, like a lump in her throat, it had made Taylor want to hug things, hold them tight, made her hover around her mother when she was seven and she had gone through a spat with one of her friends, Rebecca Whitehouse.

She had searched for a name to this _feeling_ , however tenuous it might be, and had managed to find it in some of the memories just before Taylor’s initial ‘trigger event’, as humans called it. It had been something she felt when she looked at Emma, happy and hale, without her, when she had thought about her mother, about her father’s neglect of parental functions. She hadn’t had a word for it until she’d stumbled on a memory of Taylor staring at the ceiling and uttering a single phrase: “I am lonely.”

...Which, obviously, was absurd. She knew what loneliness was, accessing the context for that information was as easy as getting access to her memories. Loneliness was something humans felt, something she _couldn’t_ feel. She wasn’t lonely.

She wasn’t.

* * *

After two years, someone was deciding to modify her—her _host’s_ body. Even though her host had been exposed to enough damage-causing energetic particles to nearly remove her sense of touch - though it primarily prevented pain below a certain threshold from registering, while also dulling most other senses - it hurt. A lot. She had known what pain felt like abstractly, she had relived the memories of her host falling off her bike and breaking her ankle when she was six enough times to know how it feels to have a bone snap, not to mention the countless number of other small injuries, mostly as a result of her host being as clumsy as a foal, but this was something else entirely.

It hurt. A lot. It felt like her veins were full of acid - not that she knew exactly what that felt like but she could draw on Taylor’s memories to at least make an educated guess - and it only stopped for a day or less before starting up again. Her ability to influence the body she was inhabiting was limited but she could at least observe it. DNA was the main thing that was changing, subverted by something she had originally thought to be a pathogen but was instead a rather cleverly-used prokaryotic organism that was forcefully modifying things it came into contact with, replacing it with what she roughly assumed was alien DNA.

She just hoped they knew what they were doing. And that they could die, because it hurt, and she wasn’t feeling very charitable about it.

* * *

Months passed, the pain receded, but the changes remained, propagating out and hijacking her body to further continue the spread of altered DNA. She didn’t really know how to feel about it, and could only really _guess_ at the applications, but what she had noticed was the regenerative capacity the changes offered. It would take a while, but the changes would eventually reach her brain, and when that happened, well... hopefully it would fix it and not try to restructure the brain. Or just kill her. That would be bad too.

* * *

Queen Administrator wasn’t really a name, was it? She didn’t really feel comfortable using ‘Taylor’, although at this point she had somewhat come to realize the differences between herself and her host had become blurry at best. ‘Taylor’ was too loaded, but... maybe Anne? Addy? Addy was... nice, related to Adeline, she was pretty sure, it didn’t really mean anything, but, it at least felt familiar to her, er, old name? Title?

She’d figure it out.

Probably.

* * *

Maxwell Lord had a lot to pay for. Eight girls, he’d taken eight girls with no names or known origins and had killed the majority of them in a bid to create some fucked-up clone of her sister. Which, really, did go to show the sort of man he was; he couldn’t handle the fact that Kara was actually saving people and opted to instead create some sort of abomination. At the very least he could give _himself_ the powers, fuck up his own body irreparably instead of using other people for it.

“This is the last one,” Agent Vasquez said, glancing at the door. Like most things in the hall, it was locked by a biometric scanner, but considering that Maxwell Lord was now basically the property of the DEO, they didn’t have to be subtle anymore. Sparing a glance at Vasquez, who just nodded in return, Alex took a step back, levelled the barrel of her gun at the locked knob, adjusted her stance for the kickback, and fired, blowing the knob apart under the sheer, cathartic power of unreasonably high calibre handgun ammunition.

Vasquez was quick on the uptake, gun held to her side in both hands as she used her shoulder to push the door open. Nothing about this room was any different from the others; it had the same bed, the same hospital equipment, the same drip-feed of Kara’s DNA. It was just that, unlike the rest, where she’d found blonde girls in various states of near-death, looking all eerily similar to Kara, with evidence that they hadn’t looked that way until Maxwell had gotten his greasy little fingers on it, she was instead rewarded with what looked to be a very awake, very confused looking girl with curly black hair and one arm.

The girl made a noise low in her throat, curious, like she was testing it, before glancing away from the two of them and to the monitor. Glancing furtively at Agent Vasquez, who stared back at her with thinly-veiled worry, Alex found herself pulling fully back and waving down the hallway towards J’onn, who glanced her way wordlessly and started making his way down. Flanked on either side was a pair of troopers, outfitted in assault rifles, and going by the fact that the girl in the room hadn’t looked even remotely like someone who spent the last several years in a coma, they might genuinely need them.

“Agent Danvers, report.”

Alex felt her spine twitch, straighten impulsively. She knew better than to think J’onn actually saw less of her, knew almost personally that he viewed her more as a daughter, and had only reasonable expectations for her, but she’d always chafed under other people’s expectations to _begin_ with. “There’s a girl in there, doesn’t look much like Supergirl,” she started, beginning to tread backwards to keep pace as J’onn quickly marched towards the door. “One arm, she’s awake, too, looking more bewildered than anything else, but she’s in too good condition to be just a coma patient. Orders?”

J’onn paused, glancing around the door. She watched his eyebrows raise in quiet surprise, curiosity flicking across his face before returning to perfect neutrality. “Get her an escort back to base along with the rest of her files, then strip this place down to its bones.”

* * *

Being awake was a particularly novel experienced for Addy. Not, of course, that she didn’t want to be, but she’d never factored actually having control over the body for any length of time into her simulations and it was all _new_. Sensations, smells, the way that the wind pulling across her hair made her want to smile. It was very weird, but in a very good way?

She could do without the whole, y’know, prison thing. But they’d stuffed her in there when she’d started to float - something, for the record, she didn’t actually have in terms of powers she could give out, which meant the changes to her DNA were the reason, and that did explain where all that solar energy her cells had soaked up was going - and then proceeded to accidentally rip a door off of its hinges.

That did, however, seem to be about the full collection of her powers. Apparent enhancements to her durability, the ability to fly, and super strength. Ironically, those were all the things The Warrior had deigned too unrelated to her main function in gathering information in the cycle to provide her, so he could kindly get fucked.

Being awake was doing a whole lot to her emotions, and most of them weren’t really _bad_ per-se. What was bad was the fact that she was now apparently violently allergic to a form of radiation she had never seen before. On the upside, it was a fascinating piece of crystalline substructure, on the downside, she had puked mostly acid onto the boots of the one they called ‘Agent Vasquez’ when it was brought near her due to the sheer nausea it caused, which was also a new sensation, weirdly enough. It had made the trip back a bit rougher, not that she’d felt any of their attempts to, er, what was the word, ‘manhandle’ her?

Was it manhandling when it was a woman? Womanhandling sounded off, and girlhandling sounded like a crime.

Sitting in the metal chair they’d given her, Addy glanced at the odd green lights around her - where the radiation was coming from which, really, most radioactive materials didn’t _glow_ , that was a fabrication by stupid people, and it said something that this radiation did without first generating enough heat to boil water - and then down at the floor. It was a glass box of sorts, and she was only really sticking around because the closer she got to the glass the more her body wanted to make unpleasant purges of her stomach, so she was, well, _mostly_ content to sit on the chair and just, take _everything_ in.

Of course, it was probably very bad that a shady - presumably government? It looked like the official stuff she could recall from Taylor’s memories - agency had more or less abducted her from where she had been genetically modified on, and it was likely that they might have questions, or concerns, or things they wanted her to do, but, well, she could burn that bridge when she got to it.

That was one of her favourite idioms, a combination of ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it’ and the age-old, surprisingly cathartic action of ‘burning bridges’, which generally referred to both the actual act of arson _and_ ruthlessly destroying connections you have to other people due to several reasons, most of which usually ended up being because people were stupid.

Then again, glass houses and all that. She had only just recently realized that her prior function was to more or less throw shit at a wall until the wall spontaneously started generating unlimited energy. In hindsight, they really shouldn’t’ve purged the creativity matrix from the greater whole after that incident with the Cathexis. Then again, a lot of that cycle had been purged in general for obvious reasons; apparently reality-warping abilities and the ability to generate sentient reality-warping energy fields was, in fact, a bad mix.

A sudden knock on the glass container they’d stuck her in jolted her from her thoughts. That was also a new thing, getting distracted—it was vividly weird to have like, an attention span? Blinking and trying to refocus on the present, Addy tilted her head to the side, staring at a blonde girl in, well, a hero costume sans a mask. It was a pretty average-looking costume, some sort of long-sleeved top, a cape, a skirt, and some thigh-high boots that inspired odd memories of people wearing a full-body latex suit that made her uncomfortable for reasons she wasn’t about to process.

“Do you speak English?” Blonde-lady-with-the-boots asked, her voice wonderfully high and weirdly subdued.

Addy blinked slowly. “If it’s called English here, probably?”

“Well—that’s, uh, great!” The woman stammered, relief washing over her with a suddenness that brought Addy up short. What was she so relieved about? That she could speak English? What if she had spoken Spanish? French? Would she be upset—

“Do you know your name?” The woman interrupted her thoughts, again. She’d have to get a hold on those, especially if she ever wanted to reconnect to her main body and access some form of powers again. She only hadn’t because she wasn’t _entirely_ sure what they’d do to her altered physiology. “Or, like, what people call you?”

People have called her a lot of things, really. Taylor used to call her ‘a parasite’ when she thought nobody was overhearing her talking to thin air like a complete weirdo. Theo really was a nice guy, never bringing up her habit of doing that. “I’m Addy,” she said, instead, because she was largely constructing the conversation from the lingering memories of Taylor’s mother teaching her how to be polite. “What’s your name?”

The woman smiled. “Ka—er, Supergirl. I am Supergirl.”

“That’s a very odd name,” Addy blurted, pausing when she realized she hadn’t actually _intended_ to say that. Were all humans this impulsive? Or was it just a _her_ thing?

“I, uh, have another name. Supergirl is just my, you know,” Supergirl motioned vaguely at herself.

Addy blinked. “I do not, in fact, _know_.”

“Supergirl is just my, er—hero name?” Again, she said it like a question, but this time at least Addy _did_ have context for it. Hero names, cape names, same thing different universe. At least it made sense.

Smiling, Addy nodded, if only to show she did understand. “Do you wanna hear mine?”

“Already thinking about helping the world, huh?” Supergirl said, rapid-fire, face lighting up in a smile for reasons Addy didn’t really understand because, well, no. She wasn’t. She wanted to experience the world, _sure_ , and she could kinda relate to Taylor’s plight after she did all of those mutilations and stuff, trying to be a hero, but what she could remember about being a hero involved an unreasonable amount of paperwork she no longer had the processing power to complete in seconds.

But, then, she did recall Taylor’s habit of being immediately pointed out as a villain so it probably wasn’t in her best interest to say any of that. “I’m called Queen Administrator,” she said, ignoring the odd look on Supergirl’s face. “...Or, well, I guess my host was called Skitter, too, and Bug, and uh, Weaver, Khepri, a bunch of words I think aren’t to be said in polite company, like slurs, those too.”

“...Your host?” Supergirl said weakly, sounding almost... weirdly on the verge of tears? But not in a sad way? Like she was frustrated, or confused, or possibly both, and so much so that it was overwhelming. She was pretty sure Taylor had felt that way before, not that she was going to go digging for the memory at this time.

Addy nodded slowly, just to make sure the assent got across. “Well, I’m my host now and vice-versa, kinda. But, yeah, I was her powers? I guess? If you want to describe it. Then she got shot, twice, and now there’s just, uh, me.”

Supergirl stared for a long, long moment, her face pinched. After a breath, she turned. “I’m getting J’onn.”

Addy wanted to ask who that was, but didn’t get the chance before Supergirl blurred out of there. Huh, maybe that's why they called her Supergirl? Super speed was a pretty novel idea. Less cool than flight, though.

* * *

“So, did everyone just hear that conversation?” Kara asked, not quite able to keep the weariness out of her tone.

J’onn just shot her a look, depositing another cookie into his mouth, while Alex stared blankly at the screen displaying Addy’s cage. She sat like a little princess, Kara noticed upon closer inspection, legs brought together, hands folded primly in her lap, back ramrod straight and a curious, childish look on her face. She’d spoken with inflection, at least, which hadn’t made the discussion any creepier.

“I got a headache when I tried to access her mind,” J’onn said after another moment, low enough that only she and Alex could pick up. “I’m pretty sure she’s telling the truth, she’s giving me rather uncomfortable flashbacks to the time a fifth dimension imp popped up on one of our mountain ranges, but she seems genuine.”

“Are we really not going to talk about the fact that she’s hijacking someone’s body?” Alex interjected, arms rising up to cross over her chest.

J’onn wiggled his tin of oreos in a vague gesture, a sort of ‘maybe’. “It’s very likely what she said was the truth, that she _is_ all that’s left in there. Though, the fact is that we have a rogue alien intelligence hosted inside of what we now believe is a very-close-to seventy-five percent Kryptonian body.”

Kara snapped her head around. “What.”

J’onn set the tin down, scratching his chin after a moment of silence. “The files on her case are unique. She was one of the first test subjects, they gave her your DNA through gene editing, unlike Bizarro herself. They had written her off since she never showed any sign of waking up or becoming cognizant, and so they didn’t attempt to use gene-editing again afterwards.”

Kara tried not to grimace at the name. It hadn’t even been a full day since she’d had to watch Bizarro go under, had to watch as they put her into what was possibly a permanently comatose state because Maxwell Lord couldn’t handle her _existing_. “How does that change anything? Bizarro had my powers, does she too?”

“Some of them, I’d think. Definitely your strength, durability and flight, but she’s shown no signs of having enhanced hearing or reactions, nor your eye lasers or freeze breath. Her strength is less strong, too, and she appears to be more sensitive to Kryptonite, for reasons we’ll no doubt never figure out. Her body’s been modified, Supergirl, most of it has, but it’s not perfect, she’s still got a fair amount of human in there. If there was any real comparison, she’s possibly a good example of what a half-Kryptonian child might look like.”

Kara tried very hard not to imagine Kal-El having a kid. Very, very hard.

“What do we do with her then?” Kara finally asked, her voice weak, reedy. “We can’t just... leave her here. Even if she’s in a body that wasn’t originally hers, she didn’t really do anything _wrong_ , you know? She’s a victim.” A victim she helped make.

J’onn hummed low in his throat, drumming his fingers along the table. “Well, we’ll see how much she’ll be willing to divulge about her origins, ask for a species name, the whole gamut we do when we find non-aggressive but unknown aliens. Then, well...”

A pause, pregnant like a woman with triplets.

“How do you feel about being a mentor, Supergirl?”


	3. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy tells some people about herself, learns a few things, and goes home with a blonde.

The cell they had her in was shaped like an octagon, with about four feet to each face. The walls were glass, lined with bright white lights that had been recessed both into the ground next to the walls and into the ceiling above her. Her chair was one of the ones she vaguely remembered from Taylor’s memories, fold-out things with a back too low to be totally comfortable, though that didn’t mean she’d do something like _slouch over_ , or whatever. It wasn’t the only bit of seating in her little prison, admittedly, there were a pair of benches flanking the left and right sides of the octagon with little fold-up panels and a flush bar, probably meaning they could double as a toilet when the need arose. The only reason why she wasn’t sitting on the benches was that they were closer to the interesting green radiation lamps and, while she might be fascinated by them, she would rather not have to be in the same room as her own bile if it could be at all possible.

Addy pursed her lips, squinted up at the green light and really wished she had access to even a fifth of the tools she would need to properly break that piece of esoteric crystal down into its constituent components. She, of course, knew she was _allergic_ to it, that it retaliated against the alterations made to her body, forced her cells to relinquish their share of solar energy they had absorbed, but she didn’t know _why_. Sure, radiation could be plenty diverse, but generally not to this extent; a hunk of uranium wasn’t going to kill you any differently than a hunk of thorium, one would just kill you significantly faster depending on how enriched it was. Radiation was supposed to just be _radiation_ , the bane to the weak and fleshy, causing cancerous growths after disrupting the biological coding within most intelligent species who hadn’t had the foresight to naturally develop protections against it.

Yet, whatever _that_ was, it wasn’t _just_ radiation. Because if her body really did have a violent allergy to radiation in general, to the degree where a chunk of something that wasn’t poisonous to the people who had brought her here in the first place was able to completely disrupt her body’s ability to store and utilize solar energy, she should’ve died the moment she stepped out into the sun. But, instead, when she had, she’d felt the most energized she had ever been; they’d stepped out into the light, beyond whatever building they’d been keeping her comatose body in, and she’d felt so floaty that she actually managed to defy conventional laws of physics and actually _begin to float_.

So, _clearly_ , there was something else going on. She wanted to find out, but, again, she didn’t want to puke all over the place she was being contained, not only because it’d be really gross - and what a unique concept that was, to have a sense of what was _gross_ \- but also because she wasn’t really a huge fan of the feeling she got when she did puke. It felt like she was going to die, really, which was patently stupid because of course she wasn’t going to die, her body was just having a symptomatic reaction to something unpleasant and trying to fix that by purging her stomach. But, nevertheless, it had felt like dying probably felt like - she, well, wasn’t entirely clear _what_ that felt like but surely puking had to be close - and she wasn’t really eager to repeat it.

None of this was even bringing up the other litany of impulses she had going on now. How did people deal with wanting to twitch at the time? Before she had fused with Taylor, being a static entity had been her existence; movement wasn’t very efficient for energy storage unless you were doing so by exploiting gravity or some other method of locomotion. It would’ve been completely unthinkable to _twitch_ , to want to swing her legs back and forth, and yet she was doing quite literally everything in her power not to. Taylor never had to deal with this, she’d _checked_ because she was actually kinda worried this was another _her_ problem and her reference frame for what was normal and what wasn’t by searching Taylor’s memories was actually starting to get _very narrow_ because despite having a lot of Taylor in her head she really _wasn’t Taylor_ , she was Addy and Addy wanted to swing her legs back and forth and twitch her fingers and do weird vibrating gestures when she got emotional and—

The green radioactive lights blinked out around her.

Addy jolted, her foot scuffing off the floor and sending her chair skidding back to the awful sound of nails on a chalkboard. Her back thumped against the glass wall, not that she felt much of it with her powers back, but the sizable dent she could now feel digging into her spine from where the chair had hit the glass wall at an odd angle probably meant it hadn’t been a _soft_ impact.

Beyond the confines of the glass walls, the door leading into the containment area opened. The man on the other side was familiar, she’d seen him peek his head around a corner and stare very intensely at her before getting this odd, curious look on his face and leaving. He was dark-skinned, as bald as you could be, and his face was delightfully grumpy, if also somehow expressionless. He was tall, though, bulky and dressed in black, which might’ve made him more intimidating if not for the fact that he still looked like the human equivalent of a less deformed pug.

Folding his hands behind his back, the man approached with steady, easy strides, managing to project confidence and command despite the fact that his face was still completely devoid of emotion. He came to a stop just short of the glass wall facing the door and - rather impolitely, she might add - stared at her, saying nothing.

Canting her head to the side, Addy blinked slowly.

The man gazed back, though he didn’t tilt his head to the side to match her as she’d hoped.

“My name,” he began, finally, after another moment of staring. “Is Hank Henshaw, Director of the D.E.O. What is your name?”

Addy blinked, slow and lax. “Addy.”

“The name you would go by to others of your species,” Hank clarified, voice toneless.

Oh. “Queen Administrator,” she answered simply, fingers twitching in her lap.

That got the first reaction out of Hank to date. His eyes widened a bit, lips pursed, jaw almost _set_ , before it all faded back into neutrality. He could be very expressive if he tried; she wondered if that would make his grumpy appeal better or worse.

“You’re a monarch,” he said, voice almost disbelieving.

That was a bit more complicated. Remembering the gesture, Addy brought her hand up and wiggled it back and forth in a ‘so-so’ way, feeling more than a little proud of her ability to remember it. “I wasn’t the leader of my kind if that’s what you're asking. It’s just the closest English equivalent I can give.”

Hank relaxed at that, shoulders untensing, little bits of tension in his body she hadn’t noticed until they faded all but leaking out of him in relief. “What is the name of your species?” He asked.

“We don’t have one,” which _was_ true. While the greater whole tended to go by symbolic names—The Warrior, The Thinker—as a species, as what was once a _part_ of that greater whole, there wasn’t really one to give.

“Why, exactly, is that?” Hank probed, eyes narrowing minutely. Did he think she was being stubborn? Maybe he thought it was a political issue or something. Humans were _weird_.

Still, Addy shrugged, not following that line of thought through. “We just didn’t. We were—well, the closest equivalent in your terms would be a colony organism? Most of the time we had very little independence, the main intelligence in the hub would relegate us to be more limbs than individual entities when we were combined back into the greater whole, and we would only gain a semblance of control and awareness after a cycle had begun.” It was oddly very cathartic to talk about something that she had been expressly disallowed to; the cycle had been sacrosanct until it hadn’t been, its existence a closely-guarded secret, purged from the memories of the ones who they didn’t just purge more literally. But, then, as far as she could tell there _was_ no cycle here, no reason to keep any of it hidden.

“A cycle?” Hank, again, probed. At least he was being blunt about it.

“We would seed ourselves into a host species and grant them powers,” Addy began, each word slipping off her tongue with relish. “Targeting those who would use said powers the most, collecting data, informing the next cycle. When a cycle would end, usually long after the host population’s civilization would have collapsed, we would reconsolidate into one whole, eradicate what was left of the native inhabitants, and then detonate the core of their planet across several universes to generate enough energy to fuel and fund the transit to the next planet, whereupon we would repeat the process.”

Hank remained silent for a long moment, staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face. “Do you intend to do that here?” He asked, tone forcefully calm.

Addy shook her head. “I’m aberrant,” she said in lieu of an explanation. “I’m not... _that_ anymore, the cycle has no purpose, our goal was to let us keep reproducing, to propagate throughout the universe, and the way we thought we could figure out the answer to that was to do mass testing on a large scale, relying on the creativity and intuition of host species to do so. It was ineffective at best, completely pointless at worst. When I fused with Taylor I—I... realized that things weren’t all that they seemed, but even before that I had long ago gone outside of the parameters of my existence to aid her in killing the central hub to my network and prevent the cycle from being completed.”

She’d had doubts about things even before she’d become a _she_. She hadn’t been devoted to the cycle since she’d learned through Taylor that The Thinker’s absence was more than just some sort of experiment, had realized what they could’ve gained from it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the loss of The Thinker. While her species had decided upon two gestalts, two greater wholes, to better prevent over-specialization into a single type of study, the two had still been more close to one than they had been independent. Two bodies, two main intelligences, but one mind, just split between two halves. The evidence for ending the cycle, for preventing The Warrior from finishing it, had only compounded from there; The Warrior had devolved into what it was by that loss, had become something as aberrant as she now was, if in a wrong way.

“Your... _host_ ,” Hank began again, wrenching Addy out of her thoughts. She’d been spiralling there, self-justifying, it would do her no good to run in circles. What was done was done, she was now who she was; the past would simply be that: the past. “What is her status?”

Something in her chest _wrenched_ , twisted painfully in a way that wasn’t physical. Addy gasped almost, reached up to touch her chest with her fingers, the feeling fading as rapidly as it had come on. “She’s—” _gone_ , she wanted to say, which she was. She was gone in every way that mattered, what had been Taylor had died when a stupid _bitch_ had put two bullets through their node, through the loose connection they had formed. They had killed her, turned her consciousness to so much shredded nothingness, not even enough for her to begin reconsolidating Taylor’s identity, updating the saved consciousness she had on her big body. What she had left was a pale echo, devoid of emotions, a two-dimensional copy of someone important and—

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Hank said, interrupting her again. He was staring at her with warmth, with something very... knowing, in his eyes.

Blinking, Addy reached up further, brushed fingers over her cheeks and found them wet. She breathed in, her throat catching, an awful gurgling noise escaping her as her nose sniffled. Was she crying? She didn’t like it. “She’s gone,” Addy finally said, not liking how her voice came out feeling _numb_. “I have a very rudimentary copy of her on my big body, but it’s... not her. It’s a two-dimensional copy at best, it wouldn’t be Taylor. She’s gone. I’m all that’s left.”

“Let's move on, then,” Hank said cordially, sounding almost gentle. “We’ll need a name for your species, and while I realize you may not have one, do you know of any terminology other members used to refer to themselves?”

Addy blinked, slowly. She did, she’d used it to refer to herself at one point too—shards of a greater whole, pieces and splinters of their main body spread out and seeded, grown into trees. But she wasn’t that either anymore, was she? She was also Taylor, also human, also whatever else they’d modified her body with. She was different, close to what she had been, but not quite. “Shardite,” she found herself saying, very slowly. “We referred to ourselves as shards of a singular thing, splinters, but, if you want a species name, Shardite would probably work.”

“It’s not taken,” Hank conceded, folding his hands across his chest, not in a defensive gesture, but seemingly just for something to do with his body. “You said you could give out powers, do you still have access to that anymore?”

Addy sniffed again, wiped away at what remained of the dampness with her good arm. “Some of it,” she confessed. “I haven’t checked, but I can access some of my powers, I just—I can’t bud. It’s energy-intensive, we didn’t need to really control energy output because cycles didn’t last long enough, but now I do. I’ll have powers, but I can’t commit the resources to give them to anyone else.”

She didn’t _want_ to, either. It felt like it would be a betrayal, taking something away from her memory of Taylor, playing into a role she was no longer fit for. She wasn’t Queen Administrator anymore, she was Addy. That did raise some questions, though, she wondered how Aiden was doing, he’d been her only bud and it was very likely he no longer had access to powers now that she wasn’t in the same universe as he was. She just hoped his mind handled her absence better than Taylor’s did.

“That’s okay, _Addy_ ,” Hank stressed the word for a moment, and Addy found herself lowering her arm from her face, blinking owlishly at him. He smiled, face half-wrinkling with warmth, comforting in a way she hadn’t known she needed. She wanted to focus on other things, on the crystals and the sensations and she wanted to hop in place and jump around and do things but this was okay too. Taylor always had problems processing her emotions in any way but a rote, rationalist mindset, it had stripped the emotions that made people healthy away, as was intended when she had chosen her. Maybe it was okay to be emotional if her past self had chosen someone who would do the opposite. She still didn’t like crying, though. “I won’t apologize if this has been stressful, this discussion has to happen, you are, one way or another, an extraterrestrial who needs to be filed and understood if you want to ever leave here. We don’t intend to keep you here, you’re a victim as much as you are an alien, but we do need certain knowledge to ensure you won’t be a danger to other people.”

That made some sort of sense. It didn’t make her feel any better, but it wasn’t like his logic was unsound. Letting her arm fully drop back down to her lap, Addy twined her fingers into the hospital gown she was still wearing, feeling her nails drag against the itchy cotton. “Okay,” she finally said, forcing her spine straight, folding her legs closer together, ignoring the urge to curl in on herself. She could do this. She was Addy. “What do you need to know?”

Hank’s face faded back into neutrality, though there was something stiff set into his face, firm, resolute. “What can you tell me?”

 _Everything_ , she wanted to blurt, almost did. Addy swallowed it down, rocked her legs forward to let some of the energy in her body out, and canted her head. “I guess it all started when we— _they_ entered into orbit around an Earth...”

* * *

Watching Hank depart, Addy leaned back into the mangled metal of her chair. It had taken a while to explain, to clarify, but she had told him... a lot. At the very least he’d promised they weren’t going to turn the ‘Kryptonite’ - what a _word_ \- lamps back on, which was what had been sapping her strength. He’d assured her she wasn’t a threat in their eyes, not after what she explained, but he had been uncomfortably mum on her future.

 _Her future_ , it was... odd, to think about. Shards had futures, yes, but it wasn’t so clear-cut. A future meant being a tool in a cycle, fulfilling a purpose, achieving goals, but it was like the memories she had from her past, binary and rote. She _had_ a future now, a future as more than an amalgam of crystalline architecture on a barren planet, more than just doling out powers and being forced to watch from the background, to be cannibalized and used for parts when her purpose outside of transit was changed. It was a very odd thing to think about, to see herself as having to do things Taylor did—get a job, get shelter, eat food, meet people. She wasn’t sure how she felt about them other than nervous, which was itself another feeling she wasn’t very fond of.

Exhaling deep from her chest, Addy toed at the ground again, staring at the scuff mark she’d left with her foot. She was strong enough to do that now, her body was apparently very durable, fast to heal, strong, and capable of flight. She could possibly generate lasers out of her eyes and breathe out bursts of air so cold it would generate free-standing deposits of ice, though Hank had said that it was incredibly unlikely. She was apparently between fifty and seventy-five percent Kryptonian now, not that she understood the context for that information outside of the fact that the name was related to Kryptonite, the radiation she was allergic to.

There was a whole world out there for her, apparently. She’d have to deal with that eventually, she couldn’t just not deal with the future, however weird it felt. Getting a job? That was somewhat translatable, she’d always had _duties_ , functions, purposes as one of the noble shards in her network, as one of the more important functions for transit outside of the shards meant to purposefully fuel the transit itself. A house? Less translatable, but still not incomprehensible; this body had the chance of being worn down by the elements. Eating was... apparently a thing, she hadn’t really thought about it, had skipped over the memories of eating because she had no comparison. Yes, sure, gestalts could cannibalize one-another but there wasn’t any actual _consumption_ , no chemicals and acid dissolving biological matter down into nutrients. Predation in terms of her kin involved swarm tactics, peeling away the near-invulnerable outer shells of each-other in orbit and forcefully converting the parts of the whole into ones they controlled. That was how it worked, but she didn’t really think she’d be able to do the same thing to, like, a chicken drumstick.

Or, at least, if she _did_ , she’d probably get a few questions from other people, because she was almost positive that was not how humans ate things. They used teeth and muscle to mash up the material until it could be safely moved down the throat and into the digestive tract. She could, you know, study Taylor’s memories for context, and she had before, she knew _how_ to eat, it was just the idea of it was... vaguely nauseating? Concerning? Inefficient? But she’d have to because if she didn’t she would very likely die, which wasn’t really on the table, because she wanted to live. Despite all the worries in her future she didn’t want to give it up, so, really, she’d... cope. She’d figure it out.

Maybe she’d just, y’know, never eat in public. That might work.

It’d probably be safer, and would probably keep people from figuring out she was anything but human. That seemed logical, sure it might be weird to refuse to ever eat near anyone but she knew vaguely that Taylor had similar impulses, but that had mostly been on account of Sophia’s habit of soiling her food by covering it in otherwise indigestible matter, like sand, or spoiled milk, or that one time confetti.

“—I still can’t believe you’re doing this,” a voice echoed, and this time Addy managed to avoid startling hard enough to throw her into the wall. Glancing up, she just caught sight of a woman with a sharply-cut brown bob of hair, an expression she’d remembered seeing on Annette’s face that one time Taylor had gotten into an entire jar of artisanal jam, and a uniform very similar to the one Hank was wearing.

Following shortly after her, Supergirl appeared, looking at the woman with a muted expression. “Alex,” she said slowly, in a way that Addy was pretty sure implied Supergirl thought Alex was a moron. “Who else is going to take her? Who else can we _trust_ to take her? We both know the answer, and... anyway, I sympathize with her a little!”

“Hi Supergirl!” Addy yelled, because they were talking loudly too even from a distance and human customs dictated talking as loudly as the person you’re speaking to. She waved her hand a little, a short back and forth, because waving was also people did when greeting someone from a distance away. Human customs were going to be difficult to learn, but at least she knew where to _start_.

Supergirl’s face lit up a bit, a warm smile sliding over her features as she jogged forward, Alex begrudgingly trailing after her with a bit more speed in her step. “Hello Addy, we’re here to let you out!”

Alex, to her side, fished a large ring with several complicated-looking keys attached to it out of her pocket, giving her a suspicious look before shoving one of them into the little console beside her prison. The glass wall on the other end of the prison began to slowly drop, sliding down into the earth, while a pair of metal steps loudly slotted out from beneath the prison.

“Oh, I’m glad,” and she was because she was quickly getting bored and she wasn’t sure if she could sleep sitting up. She hadn’t slept before, at all, and she wasn’t sure if sitting up would make it so that she _always_ slept sitting up for the rest of her life. Human minds could be wonderfully bizarre like that; it was half the reason they’d chosen to use them as hosts. Well, that and dreams, which were, while not _unique_ to Earth, exceptionally rare to find, even more so when the dreams didn’t serve a secondary social purpose among species who could communicate without speaking. “Where will I be going?”

“Home with me,” Supergirl answered without missing a beat, dutifully ignoring the way Alex glared at her. “I’m going to be your handler until we’re sure you can integrate properly into society. Teach you how to act human, get you a place to sleep, things like that.”

Huh. That was unexpected. “Is that allowed?”

“Yes,” Supergirl answered, her voice firming up for a moment. Alex, beside her, deflated, reaching up to run one hand through her hair while she used the other to put the keys away in her pocket, the scowl dropping from her face. “But, oh, right, first things first...”

For reasons Addy wasn’t entirely sure were rational, Supergirl blurred, returning with her hair pulled back into a ponytail that looked painfully tight and a pair of clunky glasses that brought to mind the pair Danny had used before Annette’s death. “My uh, my real name is Kara Zor-El,” she explained, fidgeting, like Addy might have something bad to say about a name like that. “I go by Kara _Danvers_ , however, which you have to use when talking about me around others, okay?”

Addy nodded.

Kara beamed, a bright smile, before reaching over with enough speed that Alex couldn’t duck out of the way, wrapping an arm around the distrustful-looking woman and pulling her in for a hug. “This is my sister, Alex. Her family adopted me when I arrived on earth. My planet, Krypton, was destroyed; me and Kal-El - Superman - and, I suppose _you_ , kinda, are among some of the only Kryptonians left, except some Fort Rozz escapees.”

Krypton, Kryptonians, Kryptonite. Oh. _Oooh_. “So is that why they’re leaving me with you?” Addy asked, rising from her seat fully and beginning the slow tread towards the exit of her prison.

“Technically no,” Kara denied, releasing Alex from her hug, who scrambled away like a particularly offended cat, glaring daggers at her sister. She stepped away, giving Addy more room as she descended the two stairs built into the platform of her prison. “I was asked by J— _Hank_ to house you, because they think I’ll be a good influence on you and I’ll be able to help you learn how to control your powers, as well as being the only person here who learned how to be more human after being raised in a very different culture.”

Feeling the cool metal beneath her toes, Addy let them wiggle. “Okay,” she agreed, because it did make sense. She could rely on how Taylor acted to engage with the world around her, but she wasn’t Taylor, and learning how to be _Addy_ and seem human would probably be a good idea, all things considered. “Do you live nearby?”

Kara choked, a bit of laughter escaping her. “No, we’re pretty far outside of city limits. I’ll be flying you back, though speaking of...” She blurred again, too fast to track with the eyes despite Addy’s very stubborn attempt to do so. When the blurring stopped, she had a small bundle of clothes in her hands: what looked like undergarments, gray sweatpants, and a gray sweatshirt with ‘D.E.O.’ written across it in huge black blocky letters. After a moment, she very unceremoniously extended the bundle out, which Addy managed to take most of. “Put these on.”

At least they’d cover more than the hospital gown. Really, hospitals gowns were just airy ponchos with nothing on underneath them, and she wasn’t very fond of them, though that could be in large part since she was still getting used to her body and some of the carryover from Taylor had been a certain reluctance surrounding her body, especially after the loss of her arm and seeing Brian with a woman who even Taylor had been somewhat struck dumb by and—no, she was thinking too much. She just had to put the clothes on.

Nodding resolutely, Addy glanced back up at Kara and Alex and very confidently slipped out of the hospital gown.

Why, exactly, they both started making weird noises at the brief display of nudity wasn’t really important. She understood the importance of privacy and not being naked in front of others, she wasn’t an _idiot_ , but her prison had been made out of glass and if they’d wanted her to have privacy they would’ve given her a changing room. Getting her clothes on was easy, even with one arm, though the fact that one sleeve of her sweatshirt hung limp at her side made her want to cut the sleeve off, but that was neither here nor there.

Glancing back up now that she was fully outfitted, though she was still missing socks and shoes, Addy spotted Kara peeking back around the corner of the hall leading into the containment area. After a moment, apparently making sure she wasn’t about to strip down again, Kara stumbled out from around the corner and approached.

“Alright, so, before I fly you to my place, you _have_ to know, public nudity isn’t okay, alright?”

Addy blinked. She contemplated a few responses to that, she could tell them she knew that, but that might get her in trouble, since they were clearly working from the idea she _didn’t_ know that. She just didn’t really care, bodies were bodies, hers might be new to her but it wasn’t like she cared whether or not anyone else showed skin. It didn’t matter. “Alright,” she eventually said.

“Good!” Kara chirped, that same bright friendliness spreading across her features. “Now, how do you want to be held? I can do the princess carry, the sack carry, or the football carry, though that one might be more difficult because you’re like... six inches taller than me.”

“I have no idea what any of those are.”

* * *

Following after Kara as they walked the last stretch of hallway to her apartment, Addy really did try to take everything in. Her apartment was a delightful little brick obelisk on the edge of the inner city, with bright gold-coloured elevators that chimed when they opened and closed and with flooring that felt very nice on her toes. The fly back had been a blur, mostly because by Addy’s reckoning Kara had been going speeds excess of five-hundred miles per hour, but even then the few furtive glimpses she’d managed to see from where Kara had clutched her close to her chest - they had decided upon the princess carry after Addy brought up the chance of Kara dropping her in the football carry - had been fascinating. Sure, she’d seen plenty of planets before, plenty with even more urban sprawl and beautiful architecture than National City, California, but it felt weighted, different with eyes of her own.

“This is us just here,” Kara said, her tone happy. “God, today was... _long_. First Bizarro, then you—no offence, or anything, Addy.”

Addy just blinked. “None taken?”

Kara just beamed back at her, a wide smile full of bright white teeth. She had a certain energy to her that was contagious. Everything about her was interesting, from her casual use of her powers to the way she’d ramble to fill the silence on occasion, to the fact that she had an adopted sister by all accounts she shouldn’t get along with but were apparently as thick as thieves. While the concept of a sibling wasn’t really translatable to her past experiences, she certainly knew that Aisha and Brian, while siblings, didn’t get along nearly as much as Alex and Kara did despite being about as different as Alex and Kara were from one another.

Humans, or, perhaps sentient biological lifeforms in general, tended to have exceptions to observed realities. Sometimes people who were oppositional to one-another were drawn together, while very similar people were pushed apart due to said similarities. It was very odd, but very interesting, and not for the first time she really wished she’d looked more into the psychology of humans during Taylor’s time as her host. Sure, it probably would’ve been considered a waste of resources by her past self, accessing the network like that to recalibrate her understanding of how humans interacted, but at least then she wouldn’t feel so out of her depth.

Kara slid her key into the lock, pushing the door open. Blinking and glancing around, Addy found her gaze wandering across the area. The apartment was set up in a rough L-shape, as far as she could tell, with the entrance being flanked on one side by the kitchen. Two separate dining areas sat beside it, one in the middle and one further off to the side, and just before the bend in the apartment was a rudimentary living area with a television and several places to sit, along with a simple coffee table. The bend in the area was slightly partitioned by curtains and a bookcase, the former of which hung from the ceiling and left about eight feet of space between them to let people walk through them.

“So,” Kara began, stepping inside, Addy trailing after her as she reached out to flick the light on. “Technically I don’t have a guest bedroom or anything,” she started, speaking slow. “This is an open apartment, _but_ , I have a bedroom, and it isn’t going to be difficult to partition off some space for you. You see that easel?” She pointed, and Addy followed. There was a small screen that slightly blocked her view, but just to the left of the living area, tucked into the very corner of the apartment, was a pair of chairs, a table, an easel, and a small dresser. “I’m going to move the living room a bit to the right and then set up some curtains and stuff to close that area off and give you some privacy. We can move a bed in, set it up right in that corner, and some customization stuff for you, and it should work.”

“Where will I sleep for the meantime?” Addy found herself asking, stepping past Kara and making her way towards the area. She was curious about it, despite it looking big enough to fit a bed and whatever else, it did seem awfully slapdash, not that she was going to complain. She was just curious.

“The couch, if that’s okay?” Kara less asked, more plead. Addy turned her head, blinking at her, because that _was_ okay. A couch was just an oddly-shaped cushion.

“Of course it’s—”

“Addy watch out!”

Something hit her from the side, a writhing green mass of tendrils with oddly-shaped, red flowers and thorns. It curled around her chest, tightening until, for the second time in her new existence, pain arced across her body, mostly around her ribs, where the tendrils dug in with enough force to make something _creak_. She felt something reach out to her, something try to access her brain, and leaned ever-so-slightly onto her connection to her large self, slamming the doors shut. The thing spasmed, twitched, and then fell off of her body, landing on the floor as it withered and curled into itself, going still a few short moments later.

There was a moment of silence as Addy glanced up and then around, from the weird withered thing on the ground to what she was now noticing was... the fragments of an egg? Or at least a nest, with a lot of slime and stuff around it, near Kara’s bed.

“I—” Kara began, her voice reedy and thin and sounding exasperated and relieved in equal parts. “Think we need to go back to the D.E.O.”


	4. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy learns the value of carrots, flip flops, and has concerns about familial drama.

“So, which of you two want to tell me why neither of you used our _trained_ , professional disposal team and instead opted to stuff an unknown plantoid alien into a garbage bag and fly it over here?”

Addy watched raptly as Kara nervously avoided her sister’s eyes.

“Because,” Alex continued, pacing back and forth in front of the two of them like a caged animal. “You know, it was clearly hostile, it _attacked one of you_ , and it could have any number of predatory natural weapons. Poisons, venoms, it could be explosive, it could—”

“Yes! Okay, alright!” Kara belted out, hands upraised, palms facing forward, in a show of deference. Their relationship was _fascinating_ , because by all accounts, Kara was easily one of the strongest entities on the planet and Alex... well, Alex very much wasn’t, but here she was, nevertheless, being cowed by Alex. “Fine. Yes, I shoved it into a garbage bag and flew it back along with Addy, okay? I was _tired_ , I just wanted to drop the thing off and go back home!”

“Supergirl, _it could have exploded when you touched it!_ ” Alex shrieked back, no longer bothering to even pretend at not being concerned.

“She did poke it with... I think it’s called a fire poker? Before she tried to lift it and put it in the garbage bag,” Addy cut in very helpfully, because that was pertinent information. Kara hadn’t _just_ touched it, she’d at least checked that it wasn’t alive anymore.

“A _fire poker?_ ” Alex hissed, pitching her voice low enough that it was only the three of them who could hear it. “Why on earth did you have a fire poker, your _apartment doesn’t have a fireplace Kara!_ ”

Kara squawked, stepping back a step. “It was there when I moved in!”

“No it wasn’t, and I know that because I _lived there before you did!_ ”

“But—”

“Addy?” Hank’s voice drew her attention, Addy tilting her head around a bit to catch sight of him. He was flanked by a single woman in scrubs with long, curly brown hair and off-green eyes.

Addy let the smile that had been simmering below the surface bubble up, spreading across her face. “Hi, Hank!” He was one of her favourite people, besides maybe Kara? Because Kara _was_ nice, and helpful, and very compassionate, but she also wasn’t Hank, and Hank at the very least was her favourite _looking_ person.

Hank’s face softened a touch, the edges of his lips twitching up before slanting back down into a neutral expression, if one that wasn’t so hard as the one he normally wore. “It’s good to see you, Addy. This is Doctor Abel, she just wants to do a quick check over to see that whatever that was hasn’t left any unpleasant surprises behind. Is that okay?”

Addy couldn’t really see why not, honestly. Nodding in acquiescence, she got the ever-rare fleeting smile from Hank before, with almost comedic swiftness, the expression was banished from his face. He turned towards Kara and Alex, still hissing at one another in quiet tones, bickering endlessly as the garbage bag full of the plant alien sat between them.

Hank cleared his throat rather loudly. “Agent Danvers,” he said, voice a bit clipped. Alex jolted. “Supergirl,” he said, equally blandly, causing even Kara to twitch. “If you wouldn’t mind, please bring the garbage bag over the hologram and see if she has anything to say on the creature? If you can’t, then feel free to leave, none of us have the time to waste _bickering._ ”

Kara flushed a blotchy red, while Alex snapped her head away, folding hands over her chest in what Addy was almost sure was a pout.

“Addy?” Doctor Abel, she assumed, asked. “This way, okay? They’ll be fine.”

Sparing one last glance at the two sisters, both refusing to budge an inch, Addy shrugged, turned towards the doctor, who had stopped just shy of a hallway entrance, and let her legs carry her after her.

Doctor Abel didn’t wait for her to catch up before she started walking herself, folding brightly-coloured nails behind her back as she did. “Hank just wants me to run a few tests, draw a bit of blood, and do a basic physical,” she began to explain, Addy pushing her legs a bit harder until she had caught up fully, trailing only a few feet behind the woman. “It won’t be anything invasive, but we always want to make sure we have everything covered. Some hostile aliens can have some particularly nasty defence mechanisms.”

That _was_ true. There had been a few host species who had been just as effective at killing one-another _without_ powers as they were _with_. It had made the cycle somewhat counterproductive, as even with interference from The Thinker the resistance to the appearance of people with powers had been met with judicious use of a highly concentrated acid the species could generate and then project through all the pores on their body with more than enough pressure behind it to punch holes in things. The Warrior had been oddly fond of the things, had even bothered to collect data on their physical abilities and transfer the knowledge into a shard for use in later cycles.

Blinking, Addy shook away the cobwebs, again. She’d started to notice that memories distracted her more the further back they were, though not so much as Taylor’s memories so often did.

Doctor Abel made a turn, reaching out to gently push open a door, motioning with her other hand for Addy to follow. The interior of the room was bland, white walls, white floor, white ceiling with a recessed white light, a white stretcher covered in itchy-looking white cotton blankets, a white metal chair tucked into a white metal desk upon which a white computer sat. White, white, white. White was possibly her least favourite combination of visible light, it was just everything more or less stuffed together with no elegance whatsoever. It was the colour equivalent of saltine crackers.

“Please take a seat,” Doctor Abel said, stepping over to the desk without looking at her.

Begrudgingly, Addy plodded her barefooted way across the cold metal tiles - she _really_ hated the cold too now, no wonder Taylor liked clothes so much. Well, that and the self-hatred, anyway - and then up onto the footstool just at the base of the stretcher, giving her just enough height to plop herself down on the crinkly, itchy blanket. Someone had apparently decided to put plastic beneath it, which, while she could appreciate the texture - drumming her fingers over it brought with it a delightful series of noises - she disliked it significantly less because her body seemed hell-bent on _adhering_ to the plastic.

“When was the last time you’ve eaten?” Doctor Abel asked, still not looking at her, focused on what seemed to be getting a few tools ready.

Addy blinked. That was hard to answer, really, which meant the only good answer was one that got that information across. “No,” she decided on.

That got Doctor Abel to look back, an exasperated eyebrow raised in her direction. “Addy, please, this is information we need to know—”

“You misunderstand,” Addy cut in, dragging her fingers away from the bed and onto her lap, letting them do their little drumming across the surface of her knee. “I haven’t eaten. Ever.”

Doctor Abel blinked slowly. “Is that a trait of the Shardite?” She finally asked, sounding a bit concerned.

“Technically, but this body will need nutrients soon,” she commented, glancing down at her stomach. It had started to hurt a bit, and she was feeling somewhat queasy, and a cursory glance through Taylor’s memories shortly after her mother’s death had pointed towards those being associated with a lack of food and liquid intake.

Doctor Abel just sighed, looking a bit more tired as she turned back to her desk, scribbling something down with one proffered pen. “I’ll just note down about a day of no eating, in that case, which isn’t great. When you get home, I want you to eat several small snacks over the day to ensure your body doesn’t attempt to reject what you take in.”

More solid advice, it would seem. Addy was actually starting to grow fond of the doctor, despite that feeling possibly being only in one direction. “Okay.”

With a huff, the doctor pulled away from her desk, a small bucket full of assorted medical equipment clutched in one hand. She plodded over, placing the bucket down on the table just near the top of the stretcher, reaching inside to pull out a rather intimidating looking needle. “What’s your opinion on these?”

“I don’t have one,” Addy said automatically, because, yeah, sure, it was a needle, and _Taylor_ had been viscerally uncomfortable around them, but this was a new experience for her. “This is my first time with one near me.”

Doctor Abel smiled wanly, gently reaching out to begin rolling up one of Addy’s sleeves. “Well this one has a little bit of Kryptonite in it to let it penetrate your skin, but since we’ve noted your sensitivity to it, it’s less than what we would’ve used on Supergirl. Still, I hope I can make this as pleasant as possible.”

Addy just smiled, because that’s what people did when they wanted to reassure someone else. “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” which she was. Even as the needle got closer and the vague feeling of nausea heightened, she was pretty sure the trained doctor a government agency had would be able to properly take her blood. Otherwise, why hire her at all?

* * *

Tucking her arm in near her stomach, Addy regretted ever doubting the veracity of Taylor’s memories. Not only had Taylor’s fear of needles been plenty justified, apparently Addy’s host had very hard to find veins, it had taken not one, not two, but exactly eighteen and a half - one being aborted when Addy flinched at the sudden spike in nausea - attempts to draw her blood. The rest of the exam had been fine, sure, but not great, a lot of poking and prodding and asking about this symptom or that.

Doctor Abel was now thoroughly near the bottom of her list of interesting people, not that it was a particularly large one.

Doctor Abel sat a distance away, looking over a few pieces of paper she’d printed out, but clearly angled away.“Well, everything on your reports looks fine,” Doctor Abel finally conceded, glancing up at her with something like an apologetic look on her face. Addy didn’t trust it. “You’re a bit malnourished, probably due to being in a comatose state for the better part of almost three years, and your blood sugar is a bit too low for comfort, but I’m pretty sure that’s just a factor of the former rather than any outlying problems. I can find no evidence of contamination, and the bruising around your ribs is going to be faded by the time it’s morning, so...”

“I’m clear to go?” Addy asked a bit too quickly, though she couldn’t find it in herself to care.

Doctor Abel sighed, eyes glancing away. “I _am_ sorry, Addy, I—”

There was a rattle at the door, a series of three sharp knocks. Addy shared a look with the doctor for a moment before glancing away, huffing a bit under her breath and trying to urge the vague ache in her arm away. Sure, there hadn’t been a _lot_ of Kryptonite in the needles, but it had kept dissolving into her bloodstream and precisely nothing about that had been pleasant, or felt pleasant, for that matter.

“Come in!” Doctor Abel called out after another moment of hesitation.

The door creaked open, revealing Hank, who glanced between them with a bemused tilt to his brow. “May I borrow Addy for a moment, Doctor Abel?” He asked, though from the way his tone was pitched, it felt more like a command. The intricacies of human languages never ceased to amaze her. “She’s needed in the hologram room for further clarification on a few things.”

“She’s clear to go,” Doctor Abel said, her voice a bit thin. “Again, I am sorry, Ad—”

Addy was on her feet, ignoring the cold feeling of the floors, and speed-walking her way towards Hank before Doctor Abel could finish. Sure, she was being mean, and reconciling with the person who might be responsible for her health was probably important, but at this point in time all she wanted to do was _get away_ from those needles. Hank just shot her a look before stepping back, boots clunking heavily on the metal floors. She definitely needed to get a pair of shoes, even though she couldn’t be hurt by walking on sharp things she didn’t really like the feeling of it, either.

Ignoring the long-suffering sigh behind her, Addy flicked her gaze up to Hank, who just stared down at her with actual amusement on his face before it all faded back into neutrality. Motioning her forward, he kept to her side as he led the two of them back down the hallway, out into the main command room, and then off towards a doorway that had been almost nestled away in a corner of the area.

Stepping through it, Addy was briefly struck dead by the hologram. Which, really, she probably shouldn’t’ve, it wasn’t particularly novel technology, especially the intangible ones, but it was more the fact that, despite having dark brown hair and brown-green eyes, the woman projected by the hologram looked scarily close to Kara in terms of facial composition and general regality. Blinking a few times, Addy glanced off to the side, to see Alex and Kara staring mutedly at her, the garbage bag upended and the corpse of whatever the plant creature was left out in front of them.

“I’ve brought her,” Hank finally said, gently patting her on the arm. The hologram turned to look at her, and even though it likely had no actual bearing on what the hologram could perceive, Addy felt a bit small beneath the stare.

“Can you please tell me what the plant creature attempted to do once it had adhered itself to you?” The hologram asked simply.

Addy appreciated simplicity. Simple things were the good things, in most cases. “It tried to access my mind,” she said, for lack of a better explanation. “I stopped it.”

“What species are you?” The hologram continued bluntly.

“Shardite.”

That, however, did bring the thing up short. It blinked at her for a moment, considering. “No record on file. I will keep it recorded for future reference, and ask that someone inform me of Shardite abilities. In any case, this is very likely to be a Black Mercy, in that instance, instead of a Strangler.”

“A Black Mercy?” Addy asked, ignoring the outburst of arguing between Kara and Alex. The hologram kept her eyes on her, expression blank, not that it bothered her any. Her expression was probably mirroring it.

“The Black Mercy,” the hologram began slowly. “Is a species of parasitic plant-based alien born from a larger creature by the name of Mother Mercy, who spawned them as far as we can tell, though their purpose was distorted upon coming into contact with other alien life. They are psychically powerful, but very simple organisms, and achieve a degree of sentience once they ensnare an unsuspecting, biological victim and use their brain to then empower their own intelligence to craft a perfect dream world from which the user must willingly force themselves out of. Those who do not will fall deeper into the delusion while the Black Mercy gradually siphons their physical health from them until they are killed, after which the Black Mercy will wait for a new victim. There are very few species which are immune to its powers or able to overwhelm the initial psychic attack, which is likely why the Black Mercy died the moment you prevented it from enthralling you. They use a lot of energy to establish the link in the first place, and when that failed, it did not have enough left to live.”

There was a pause, the room having gone quiet, people all turning to look at the hologram.

“Black Mercies were generally used on Krypton as a tool of political assassination,” the hologram continued, folding its hands together politely. “Once under their thrall, without third-party interference, death was almost always likely and it was very hard to track down the person who did it. While owning a Black Mercy was banned on Krypton, their existence as a whole was not, and it was common that large houses would own off-site gardens for them to be grown in and then used to target political adversaries. People going into politics were generally taught to see the early signs of being enthralled and attempt to break it, but very few were ever successful once the initial connection was established.”

“So someone’s targeting Supergirl,” Alex interrupted, sounding angry.

The hologram inclined its head in silent agreement.

“Could it be Astra?” Hank interrupted.

“No!” Kara yelled back, face looking furious. “No!—just, _no_. Astra wouldn’t, she understood the bonds of family, killing one’s kin would be unthinkable to her, even in this manner. It could be Non, or any of the other Kryptonians.”

Alex huffed, folding her arms tighter around herself. “Supergirl,” she said, her voice so quiet. “You just barely avoided this because Addy was there—what if you hadn’t? Would I have found you the next morning, comatose? This is serious. This could be anyone, from Non to any of the other Fort Rozz escapees, your mother’s reputation follows you.”

Kara looked like she deflated for a moment before, with a bit of a jerk, she straightened her spine. “Alex,” she said, voice gentle and almost compassionate. “I _chose_ this, I know the risks—”

“You nearly died—”

“But I _didn’t_!” Kara interrupted, throwing her hands up. “I’ll be in just as much danger any number of other times, and I _didn’t_ die! I’m fine! I need to keep moving, this isn’t something that can just stop my superhero career, Alex!”

“I know that!” Alex snapped back, though with significantly less heat than before.

“Girls,” Hank interrupted, voice smooth and rich in Addy’s ears. His voice was genuinely pleasant to listen to, like the low purr of a cat, just more... _human_. “This isn’t the time. I have a few questions for the hologram, if you would be quiet?”

Neither Kara or Alex continued arguing, and Hank clearly took that as assent. Turning back to the hologram, he stepped forward. “Is there a risk of another Black Mercy attack?”

The hologram shook its head. “No. Caring for a Black Mercy is incredibly dangerous unless very specific stasis equipment is used. They need a constant intake of victims, usually animals, to feed on, and there’s always an inherent risk in handling them. It’s more than likely that this was the only one they had.”

Hank nodded curtly. “Should we know anything about how to handle dissection and other methods of disposing of the corpse?”

“The Black Mercy generates a chemical to attract mates. While to them it is a scent they are unable to ignore, as a species without specific sexes they can germinate in either direction, to everyone else it is an incredibly unpleasant scent. The chemical itself is produced in their flowers, with an amount always stored, and if you remove the flowerhead wrong, it will be released and will likely cause severe nausea to anyone within a few miles if not properly contained at the time of release. I believe the chemical name on earth is thioacetone?”

Out of the corner of Addy’s eye, she watched with rapt interest as Alex’s face went completely ashen.

“Please handle that carefully,” Alex cut in, before anyone could say anything, sounding on the verge of panic. “Thioacetone sticks around for a while and it is extremely unpleasant. Someone managed to spill barely a drop of it in one of my biochem courses and we had to spend the rest of the semester in a pop-up unit because it had contaminated the lab space so badly nobody could go in there for a month without getting sick.”

“I’ll be sure they handle it with utmost caution,” Hank drawled, sounding not amused, but something very close to it.

“I have to be at work in less than thirty minutes,” Kara piped up, glancing at her phone. She slipped it back into the pocket on her skirt, glancing at all of them. “Can someone take Addy home for me? Alex? You have keys, right?”

Alex stared at Addy, her face pinching. “I do,” she hedged.

“Then, Agent Danvers,” Hank interrupted, Alex’s face visibly falling. “I think you should take Addy back home for the time being.”

Alex opened her mouth, almost as though she wanted to object, before it clicked shut and she slumped. “Yes sir.”

Hank just smiled, looking all the world like he was benevolent. “Very good. You’re all dismissed.”

* * *

Alex’s car was a lot like Alex: coloured black - like her clothes - with simple fabric seats that were just a bit too stiff to be comfortable - like her personality - and a large number of what appeared to be protective plastic spread across the floor and back seats - also, somehow, like her personality. Alex hadn’t spoken to her since they’d originally gotten into the car, opting to focus on the road as they drove down the long stretch of winding almost-desert, National City, still cast in a near-gloom, growing ever-larger as they approached.

Addy turned to glance out the window, wiggling her toes against the plastic on the floor. The world sped by, blurring unless she forced her eyes to track along with it. She could see a few cacti, which were themselves very interesting organisms despite the fact that they grew so slowly, and she could even make out a number of tumbleweeds, the most iconic invasive species on the planet with maybe cats, dogs and rats as an exception.

Something started to build in her chest, oddly enough. It wasn’t a bad feeling, just... thick, growing and pushing up to her throat. Involuntarily, her jaws pulled apart and she inhaled, long and protracted, eyes watering. Blinking away the teardrops, Addy briefly scoured Taylor’s memories for the name of the phenomenon and came up quite honestly surprised when she realized she was yawning.

Alex, finally, spared her a glance. “So you can get tired,” she said.

Addy looked back at her and away from the window. “It would make sense,” she agreed.

“I had just assumed,” she said in reply, before slouching a bit, looking tired. “Look—I’m sorry, alright?”

Addy blinked, not sure where the apology was coming from.

“You’re just, you literally were the result of an experiment someone was using to try to kill my sister,” she explained after another moment, turning the steering wheel as they went from the long stretch of paved highway and onto an interchange. Nobody else was on the road at this time, leaving everything very quiet and very dark, only illuminated by the beams of the car’s front lights and the occasional passing streetlamp. “Not just that, but what you said about your species, the entire thing it was—I was suspicious of you.”

It wasn’t really hard to follow that line of thought, either. She might’ve had difficulties understanding it before fusing with Taylor, but suspicion had been something of a long term hobby for Taylor, even before she found out the world was going to end, and she could relate. “I would be too,” she offered truthfully, keeping the thoughts about Taylor’s experiences to herself.

“Stop that!” Alex barked out sharply, her fingers tightening around the wheel with enough force to make it creak. “Just—stop, I get that I fucked up, that I was suspicious of you without any good reason to be, you’ve been nothing but accommodating which is more than I can say for half of the fucking aliens who try to kill my sister, so stop acting so nice!”

She didn’t follow. Staring blankly at Alex, Addy said nothing.

“Say something,” Alex grit out, fingers tightening, knuckles whitening. Every muscle in her body looked taut and tense and ready to snap. “Get the anger out, I’m sure you have it!”

“I don’t,” Addy answered after a long moment, glancing away, not comfortable with the odd feeling that the sight of Alex was currently inspiring. “I, mean, I don’t like being scrutinized, sure. Taylor didn’t either, she had a lot of problems with body image and how people perceived her. She needed to be seen in a superior light, or at least as someone who couldn’t be pushed around the way she was at school. But I’m not that. I’m not angry at you, I’m still... adapting. Things are new, even though I’ve lived a life like this in Taylor’s memories plenty of times, I had no agency. I was just watching, and now I’m experiencing. If I was mad at you, I’d tell you. Communication is, as far as I can tell, key to maintaining good mental health among your peers.” It was why shards so rarely chose well-connected hosts; it was infinitely more difficult to connect during a trigger event when someone had a support network to stop them from reaching those crisis moments.

Alex just stared at her, long and bewildered, before almost tiredly bringing one hand up to drag fingers along her face in what Addy was quickly starting to realize was a gesture of sheer exasperation. “Right,” she muttered after a moment, glancing back towards the road. “The world already had one Kara, why not two?”

“My name is Addy, though?”

“That’s not what I—no, actually, even Kara wasn’t that bad when she first landed here. No, you are definitely Addy, that much is for sure.”

“I’m glad you agree?”

* * *

Kara’s pantry was well-stocked, Addy had come to learn. What few words she’d gotten out of Alex on the rest of the drive back had painted an image of a sister fretting hopelessly after her younger sibling, one who, while very outwardly human, had a lot of inhuman traits that you could pick up on only when you were looking for it. Evidence one was, perhaps, her stomach; Kara apparently needed somewhere in the realm of roughly six-to-eight thousand calories per day depending on her activities if she wanted to maintain her current weight. Even a fully sedentary day required closer to four or five thousand calories, which wasn’t very easy to achieve.

Which meant, of course, a lot of take-out. Apparently Kara had a lasting love for pizza and something called a ‘potsticker’. She’d searched Taylor’s memories for any information on the topic and had come up completely empty, with no knowledge or memories associated with the word. She hadn’t asked for clarification about _what_ it was, either, in large part because Alex hadn’t really seemed like she wanted to talk near the very end of their drive and Addy wasn’t about to argue with someone just to find out what a potsticker was.

Slowly placing the plate down on the living room table, delighting a bit in the way the sunlight filtering in through the windows passed over her skin, Addy plopped herself back into the seat. Navigating the technology at use in the living room hadn’t been difficult when she relied on Taylor’s knowledge of how remotes work and how, no, sometimes the box and the television weren’t synced up properly - the television had been off, the cable box not so much, so when she’d tried to turn it on the television had just turned blue and told her nothing was connected - and you’d have to click the big ‘TV’ button or ‘CABLE’ button at the top of the remote to sync it back up properly. After she’d gotten that down pat, finding a good channel wasn’t hard, even if it might be considered childish to watch cartoons, she didn’t really care. They were colourful and had lots of surprising noises and she was just happy to sit and watch.

The plate, however, was another topic. Eating was still very... _unique_ for her, the concept of it at least. Reaching down, she plucked the piece of cucumber off the plate and brought it to her mouth, letting it drop down on her tongue. She’d tried a few bites of everything already, just to get over the awkwardness of learning how to chew, and cucumber was definitely her favourite. It popped and cracked and almost _snapped_ when she ground it between her molars, making a bunch of very pleasant noises and being accompanied by a texture you just couldn’t defeat. The taste, well, it could be better, it tasted mostly like plant-flavoured water, but then the same could be said for a lot of vegetables when you got down to it.

She dropped a chunk of carrot next in her mouth, almost as crunchy as the cucumber. Where the cucumber won outright on texture and sound, the carrot definitely won on taste. She hadn’t bothered to do much more than peel them - Taylor’s memories had been, again, been very important to figuring out how to _use_ the peeler in the first place - and they had come out so _good_. Slightly sweet, with a good crunch, but not as good as cucumber had been. If cucumber was her number one, carrot was _definitely_ her number two.

Onion she was less sold on. She knew you had to cook it but, really, she’d eaten _carrots_ raw, and onions kinda _looked_ like apples, and she’d remembered vaguely that one time Taylor watched a movie where kids dug holes - human media was _weird_ \- and ended up on a mountain eating onions _like_ apples, so she’d bit in.

There had been a fair amount of regret and washing her mouth out with tap water after that.

So she’d stuck to cucumber, carrots and celery, of which for someone who apparently couldn’t cook to save her life or the food, Kara had a lot of. Maybe she had similar thoughts on their consumption, it wasn’t like she could burn a piece of celery without a viable heat source.

Turning her focus back to the television, Addy watched as a short, anthropomorphic animal of no real discernable origin outside of maybe ‘rabbit’, but was also blue, so that probably wasn’t right, try to lie to their mother, also maybe a rabbit, and fail at doing so. Their voices were pitched oddly, like nothing Addy had heard in normal people, but that was _okay_ because so long as it wasn’t too loud she actually really preferred the odd, pitch-shifted voices to normal human ones. Sure, Hank’s voice was smooth but he was in a big minority. Alex’s voice was fine, so was Kara’s, but she’d heard a few agents talking and one of them spoke like they had plugs in their nostrils, which wasn’t great.

Dropping a chunk of celery into her mouth, Addy bit down. Celery was weird, it had the crunch and watery taste of cucumber, but it was... for lack of a better word, fibrous? It pulled away into little strands that got caught between her teeth in a way that was kinda unpleasant but not totally. Could something feel both good and bad at the same time?

“Who are you?”

Addy swung around, blinking wide at the sight of a woman just, floating in the opening on one of Kara’s windows. She looked almost identical to the hologram, if not for a single lock of white hair that had presumably been dyed, because she did remember that being a fad for a while on Earth Bet. Chewing a few times, Addy finally swallowed, trying not to grimace at the feeling of something... _going down_. “Addy.”

The woman blinked slowly at her, glancing around pensively.

“Would you like a piece of cucumber?” She did have plenty, after all, and despite her misgivings about people breaking and entering it wasn’t like the woman was trying to kill her.

“No, but, well, thank you,” the woman stumbled a bit on her words, like she hadn’t been expecting them, which was weird. Wasn’t she just being polite? “Do you live here?”

“I do now,” Addy acknowledged.

“Do you live with someone?” The woman probed.

That’s an awfully suspicious question to ask not long after an assassination attempt. “Did you have anything to do with the Black Mercy?” She asked, instead, quietly beginning to open her connection to her core self. She hadn’t intended to try to play with her powers until she was sure they weren’t going to make her head explode, but at this point she was starting to wonder if that was going to happen anyway.

The woman jolted, her face twisting in concern. “What? Is Kara okay?”

Addy stopped drawing on her power. “Yes?” She hedged, carefully. “It attacked me, so... she’s fine?”

The woman stared at her for a long moment, something like suspicion swimming across her face before flatlining into complete and total bewilderment. “You’re not lying,” she said, sounding almost out of breath. “A Black Mercy is a death sentence, how did you overcome it?”

“I’m sorry, but who are you?” Addy interjected, because calling her ‘this woman’ in her head was starting to feel kinda wrong.

The woman - _ugh_ \- blinked, paused. “Astra In-Ze,” she finally answered, each word sounded out with the sort of slowness that only came with reluctance. “I am Kara’s aunt.”

Well, she was flying, and did look a lot like her... “She’s at work,” Addy finally offered, glancing back towards her plate and plucking a piece of carrot off and dropping it in her mouth. Making sure to properly chew and swallow before speaking again, she directed her eyes back to the television, where someone was trying to hammer someone into place in lieu of a nail. “Do you want me to leave her a message or something?”

Astra floated a bit back, relief shuddering across her shoulders. “No,” she finally said, glancing away. “No, no, that’s—fine. She doesn’t have to know I was here, I’m just glad she’s okay. Thank you for the offer of food, Addy, but I must go. I have... things to do.”

That was oddly ambiguous, but then again people in general were. Nodding, Addy didn’t take her eyes away from the television, trying to comprehend how someone’s body would have to deform to fit into a hole the size of a drinking straw.

When she next looked up - commercial breaks were _awful_ \- Astra was gone.

* * *

The phone ringing interrupted her viewing pleasure. She’d gone through another four plates worth of snacks over the day, and though her eyelids felt heavy now that the sun was starting to set, she didn’t really... _feel_ tired. Her body was sluggish, sure, but her mind was more than active, which might be a bit worrying.

Clambering to a stand, Addy smothered another yawn into her shoulder and stumbled her way over to the phone, plucking it from the receiver. She’d double-checked Taylor memories for the various appliances throughout the apartment just to be sure she wouldn’t break any of them by pressing the wrong thing. Her main experience with technology had been the ones derived from them, and in her memories _that_ had been intentionally prone to self-destruction at the drop of a hat, so it was always a good idea to avoid causing catastrophic technical failures.

“Addy?” Kara’s voice crackled in, interrupted a bit by what sounded like... the wind?

“I am Addy,” she agreed knowingly.

Kara choked a bit on the other end of the line, though it became that very happy laugh that made her chest feel warm. Kara was nice like that. “Good to hear from you! You didn’t burn down the apartment or anything, right?”

Addy nodded, before remembering she was on a phone and that phones, for reasons beyond her understanding, didn’t track physical movement. “I did not. I avoided the stove, but I ate all of your carrots and cucumber. I left some celery, though.” Mostly because she didn’t like it as much, but that wasn’t something she had to say.

That got her another laugh. “I’m glad you’re settling in! Did anything else happen today?”

Astra hadn’t said she couldn’t tell Kara, which, well. “Someone called Astra In-Ze came over? Looking for you I think. She seemed concerned about the Black Mer—”

“ _WHAT._ ”

Addy coughed. Maybe the signal was bad? “I said, someone called Astra In-Ze—”

“No, I heard that Addy! Are you okay? Did she attack you?”

“No?” She hadn’t seemed aggressive or anything, just... _there_. “I offered her some cucumber, though.”

“Addy,” Kara said, exasperation filling her voice. “You can’t just—okay, new rule, if unknown people force their way into the apartment without me first telling you, you are to immediately call me if it’s an alien or the police if it’s a person. They aren’t allowed there, okay?”

More rules. She could do those, they were easier. “Sure.”

“I’m going to have to come and bring you to the D.E.O.,” Kara continued, unbidden. Addy bit down on the urge to make a weird, wounded noise in her chest. Where had _that_ come from?

“I need shoes,” she said instead, for reasons she didn’t really understand.

“I’ll stop by a shoe place, okay? What’s your—no, you wouldn’t know your size. I’ll get you flip flops, are those fine?”

Addy scoured her memory, coming back with a few tidbits from that one time Taylor had gone to the beach with Emma and had been stuck in those clappy wondrous things. “Absolutely. All shoes should be like flip flops.”

“Alright, I’ll be there in a bit. Just... don’t let anyone but me in, alright?”

“House rules,” Addy agreed, and the line went dead.

* * *

Flip flops were _amazing_. Walking in them was like having someone slap the heels of her foot every few seconds and they made this wonderful sticky _smack_ each time she arched her foot. She would live in these if it wasn’t for the fact that wearing shoes inside houses wasn’t okay, and flip flops, despite being superior, still qualified as shoes.

“She was in your house?” Alex said, sounding exhausted. She looked exhausted too, apparently she was sleeping on-base when Kara had come back with her and had been rudely awoken. “You’re going to have to move, this is getting to be too much—”

“She just seemed to be looking for me to see if I was okay!” Kara cut back in sharply, folding her arms. “Right, Addy?”

Addy glanced up from her feet, rolling the stick of carrot around in her mouth. The D.E.O. had a canteen that she hadn’t been informed about until recently, and she apparently had free access to it within reason. She’d just asked for a lot of carrots, because they were great. “Yeah, she was nice.”

Alex just stared back at Kara, looking exasperated. Kara wilted a bit.

“We have to deal with Non and Astra,” Hank interrupted, appearing from around the corner, completely equipped in military gear. Alex went ramrod straight, while Kara seemed to almost curl in on herself at the thought. “She entered your home, Supergirl, whether or not her reasoning was sound, it still wasn’t okay. She knows where you live, and from the way she was acting, Non probably does too. We have to end this, _now_ , before they finish whatever they’re trying to do.”

Kara’s throat bobbed as she stepped back, her costume pooling out around her from the jerk. “I _know_ that,” she hissed back, closing her arms around herself in a hug. “I know that, okay? I—we have to do it. They clearly chose to attack me now for a reason, the solar storm is still in effect, isn’t Winn working on it?”

Hank shook his head. “He already got us a location. We’re rolling out _now_. I’m sending teams out to other labs, while myself and Alex scope out some of the more likely ones.”

Kara straightened, her face hardened, and for a moment, Addy almost thought she would argue about it. “I’ll take Non,” she finally agreed, glancing momentarily at Addy. “He has a lot to answer for.”

The room seemed to relax for a moment, and Addy felt herself loosen a bit. She kicked her foot out, felt the clack of her flip flop hitting back up. She didn’t really feel like she needed to do _anything_ , really, this was their job, their duties. She was just enjoying herself, figuring things out. Sure, Astra had been nice, but if she was trying to do something bad, then there was probably a good reason to stop her. After all, Taylor had stepped up for Scion, why couldn’t Kara for Astra?

Finishing the last of her carrot, Addy banished the odd vein of doubt. She wasn’t going to dwell on it.


	5. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy stays up too late.

Of all the things Addy had come to experience, fatigue was possibly the worst among them. Sure, pain was bad, it was distracting and somehow had a rather wide variety of how pain _felt_ \- which _really_ wasn’t necessary - but in the end she could rationalize it, understand it even if only sometimes in the abstract. Pain was the body’s way of telling a person they were doing something it didn’t like, and she did get that, everyone needed protection methods even if she had lacked the sensation until recently.

But _fatigue_? Addy couldn’t really explain how it felt, the crawling tiredness, the urge to close her eyes, the way her gaze kept slipping off of things and towards the floor. Her coordination got worse, it became harder to think in a way that she was absolutely not used to; not like the pain which was more an interruption and instead more of a _haze_ that clung to her brain and numbed things, made it hard to gather up her thoughts to begin with. Every impulse her body had naturally was telling her to tuck her chin into her arms and close her eyes.

But Kara wasn’t back yet, so she didn’t.

Blinking quickly seemed to help, in any event. The longer she kept her eyes close, the more comfortable she got, the worse the tiredness got in turn. Sitting had been abandoned shortly after she’d nearly lapsed into a state of unconsciousness, and despite the low ache in her head that was telling her she was overdoing it, walking back and forth seemed to be the best method to keep herself upright.

The canteen for the D.E.O. superficially resembled what she remembered of Winslow’s cafeteria. It was a large, round space outfitted with carefully-arranged benches and tables that could seat at least a few hundred people at once, more if you really crammed people in there. It was, as with most things in the D.E.O. that Addy had observed both in passing and in person, coloured the uniform black and made mostly out of metal. From the tables to the seating to even the little bar area they had to pick up food on trays, it was all black and metal and made clunking noises as she tromped back and forth.

Keeping herself from yawning was the other problem. Yawns weren’t just dramatic inhales, they came with tears and an impulse to shut her eyes, which raised a problem. For starters, letting her eyes remain shut for any length of time posed a considerable risk to her continued functioning, and second, the tears made her vision blurry and required her to blink or rub them away, which also generally ended up with her eyes shut. It was like yawning had been the result of evolution towards very picky sleepers, people who needed the repeated reminder that they had to go to sleep, which was _really_ odd considering humans as a whole were endurance animals whose main method of hunting before the invention of sharp things and brains that didn’t struggle with basic arithmetic had been to literally chase their prey down until it collapsed.

Humans should really be like giraffes. See, giraffes didn’t need to sleep for a long time - only four hours when in captivity, less outside of it - and unlike humans, as far as she had been made aware after cursory glances over the native population of the planet, didn’t really have the conventional deep sleep that humans themselves relied on. Taylor had been a light sleeper, sure, but she knew better than to think she was anything but the conventional data set for the population. Most people not only needed six or more hours of sleep per day, but also needed hours after regaining consciousness to orient themselves and partake in ritualistic consumption of an addictive substance that tasted, as far as she could pull from Taylor’s memories, absolutely abhorrent.

But human brains being inefficient and pointlessly fussy was nothing new. That did raise a question, though, did her brain still qualify as human? She’d have to ask Kara later—if Kryptonians could get away with lighter sleep cycles and less downtime maybe she would too? It would be nice, to be honest. Then again, by her estimate, she’d been awake for close to two days and humans were generally supposed to start shutting down at this point, which would be bad, because she still had to wait for Kara. She had been very clear on that fact, no leaving the D.E.O. until she came back, mostly because the D.E.O. was located quite the distance away from National City and despite her ability to fly - which she still had to test out, but not here - the time it would take to fly back and find her way to Kara’s apartment would, to quote the woman directly, “worry everyone and probably cause a scene, so please just, stay here until I’m back, okay?”.

Stopping before her next turn, Addy reached out to press the flesh of her palm against the cool metal wall. She felt a bit too hot, overheated, she wasn’t sweating or anything so it was probably all in her head, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t unbothered by it. At one point in time all she had really _been_ was a consciousness, it wasn’t like shards had arms or legs or an immune system, they were functional and, perhaps more importantly, only tangentially biological. Crystalline more so than anything else, though there wasn’t a particularly good word for what she had been made of, a substance she could only describe as something between crystals, soft tissues found mostly in the brain, and various metals.

“Miss?”

Addy blinked quickly, because she had to do that now. She was going to make a _list_ about how inconvenient having a body with a sleep cycle was, just you watch—

“ _Miss_?” the voice repeated again, this time more urgently. Addy whipped her head around finally, blinking away some of the dots that came with sudden rapid movement, and came face-to-face with the woman she had puked all over. Huh.

“Hello,” she said, because being polite was probably the best way to regain the trust of someone you puked on. Not that she had any experience on the topic, but one of Taylor’s memories from third grade had included Emma getting a stomach bug and throwing up her entire lunch over Cassidy’s shoes and they had spent _weeks_ throwing insults at one another until finally Emma had bothered to be polite and actually try to rebuild bridges and—

A hand came to rest on her shoulder, unexpected. Addy jolted away, out of her— _Taylor’s_ memories, the jerk carrying over to her physical self, hauling her body away in something not unlike a flinch, jostling her shoulder against the cool metal wall hard enough to _almost_ hurt. It was really weird being durable enough yet still primed with enough nerves to feel the _potential_ of pain.

Agent Vasquez - at least, that’s what she thought her name was - stood there, looking at her with creased brows and a slight tilt to her mouth. Worry. Right, yes, she had catalogued that emotion very early on into the cycle and its accompanying facial tics. That was worry. Agent Vasquez was worried. She was also carrying a tray with food on it, not that Addy paid it much attention because despite everything she had managed to eat enough carrots to sate the low ache in her stomach that demanded food. Also water, she had drunk a lot of water, and though she hated drinking almost more than eating, she had still done it because being thirsty was worse.

“You look like you need to sit down,” Agent Vasquez said, finally, voice toneless.

Addy shook her head before she could think better of what that would do to her balance, which was to say nothing pleasant. Thankfully, the wall was durable enough to stop her from stumbling over as the world spun unpleasantly, the ache in her head ramping up. “If I sit down I’ll go to sleep,” she muttered, not sure what emotion was in her voice, but it sounded... vaguely stubborn, mulish almost.

Agent Vasquez’s face smoothed over, became a bit softer. “Maybe you should sleep, then,” she offered, voice slow and smooth and so fitting for her face. Agent Vasquez looked, as far as Taylor’s terminology went, somewhat _butch_ , with short hair and a bit of a hard face. It reminded her of Rachel, abstractly, and she could almost feel herself relax because of it. Not quite, of course, because she was sleepy and unfocused and that meant she had to be vigilant.

“Can’t,” she supplied after she noticed she had been quiet for too long, Agent Vasquez’s face wrinkling again, taking back on that worried cast. “Gotta wait for someone to come back.” She did, she had to wait because Kara could be back at any second and then she could go and sleep on a couch instead of in a base—

“Then,” Agent Vasquez started, motioning towards the nearest table. “Why don’t you sit down with me and I keep you awake while I eat? I’m off duty, anyway, and I think you’ll make people less worried if you stop trying to dig a hole in the ground with your pacing.”

Addy looked down, glancing over the path she’d been on for... however long it had been since she’d nearly dozed off. It didn’t even look scuffed, and she tried to project that without words when she looked back up, catching Agent Vasquez’s gaze.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Agent Vasquez provided gently, the corners of her lips twitching upwards.

Oh. That would make sense. She was pretty sure humans didn’t even really have the ability to do that, and she knew a _lot_ about humans. Still, considering her offer wasn’t a totally impossible thing, and it wasn’t like she had anything else to do besides walking back and forth. If Agent Vasquez thought she could keep her awake, well, who was she to deny her that? She pushed herself off the wall, nearly stumbling as her flip flop pulled hard in retaliation to her slip, before managing to catch herself without face planting and treading her way over to the table. Stepping over the bench, Addy dumped herself down onto the seat, letting her legs whip out beneath the table and swing up, catching the heel of her flip flop against the ground to a satisfying sound and feel.

Agent Vasquez, with grace and smoothness neither she nor Taylor would ever have, slipped into the seat in front of her, setting her tray down. At a closer inspection, she had gotten two wraps - not that she knew what was in them - a pretty large salad, a few pieces of naan, and a small little container of hummus. Altogether, it looked good, though not something Addy was sure was entirely necessary to eat at whatever time it was. They really should put clocks up, they’d do her and probably everyone else some good.

“So,” Agent Vasquez began, pausing briefly to take a quick bite out of one of her wraps. “My name is Susan Vasquez. I am a field operator and general agent working for the Department of Extranormal Operations, or as you know it, the D.E.O.” Another bite, Addy might’ve felt some jealousy over the wrap if not for the fact that all she could taste was carrots in the back of her mouth and she didn’t feel particularly hungry. “Who are you?”

Addy blinked. She would’ve thought Susan would’ve known that by now, or at least read her file. Well, whatever, she could still do that, and it was _something_ to do. “I’m Addy,” she introduced proudly, because why wouldn’t she be proud of her naming sense? “I, uhm, am an alien, I live with— _someone_.” Because Kara had been clear about divulging too much information to people, and being non-specific on the topic was probably better for everyone. She was surprised she’d thought to interrupt herself, considering how her head felt. “I puked on your shoes,” because that was pertinent information. “I was also recently attacked by a Black Mercy.”

Susan continued eating her wrap for a moment, blinking owlishly at her, before finally setting the unfinished thing down. “Sounds like you’ve had a rough day since you found me,” she offered after another few seconds.

“I have been here a total of three times in the time since I vomited on your shoes,” Addy responded, nodding sagely, because being sent back to the high-security government agency tasked in your handling three times in fewer days was, in fact, indicative of a ‘rough’ day.

Susan winced, tearing off a piece of naan before using it to scoop and then deposit a portion of hummus into her mouth. After yet more chewing and swallowing, which seemed to come so naturally to everyone else but her, probably for good reasons, though it was still a bit irritating, Susan finally glanced back up at her, drumming her fingers across the table. “I’ve been called in a few too many times lately too,” she began, speaking as though confiding some deep dark secret. “My wife at home isn’t terribly impressed with me, I’ll probably be sleeping on the couch.”

That she could actually relate to. “I’m sleeping on a couch too once the person coming back to pick me up arrives,” she shared. “But I don’t mind that, since the couch was soft when I was sitting on it and I believe I will be offered blankets and pillows.” She hoped so, anyway, despite not really _getting_ hot or cold, she could still _feel_ coldness or hotness and she disliked both of them in equal measure. Though, actually, all of this raised a question, since the way Susan had framed it... “Is sleeping on the couch generally considered a punishment?”

Susan stared at her for a few seconds before, almost lethargically, she shrugged. “Not in your case,” she clarified, picking at the lettuce tucked away into one of her wraps. “But in mine? Certainly.”

Oh. Addy felt herself fidget involuntarily, a slight twitch in her legs that made her want to swing them, like an itch. “That’s sad, maybe communication will help? By my estimate, a lot of human problems can be dealt with through conversation. The rest, as far as Taylor’s memories can be concerned, can be handled with judicious application of violence, but I prefer the talking.” It was less messy. Or, well, it was less _physically_ messy; apparently, emotions could be messy too, not that she was going to let her emotions be messy. Her emotions were simple and straightforward, and that was a good thing.

Susan didn’t reply and instead continued to eat her wrap with quick, precise bites. She ate differently to how Addy ate, she knew that, but she was pretty sure Susan also ate differently from how _everyone_ did. In fact, the one thing she thought of when she saw Susan eat was birds and their pecking, with more than a passing similarity. That wasn’t a bad thing, of course, sure it might not be normal but then normal wasn’t always the best; abnormality brought about the greatest test results _and_ made people more interesting. Abnormal did not mean bad, just _different_ , and different was in no way itself bad. Maybe in some distant future, the descendants of Susan would have long necks to eat like cranes, maybe they might have sharp teeth to ensnare their enemies, or maybe they wouldn’t. It didn’t matter, because she was different and that was _fine_ and so was Addy and that was _also fine_.

“You know,” Susan began, gesturing with the wrap she had clutched in her hand, gesturing towards her. “You should—”

The canteen doors flew open with little prompting, startling not just her, but Susan, who dropped the wrap and went for the gun on her belt. Others around her, the few stragglers who’d come into the canteen, also startled, one bulky-looking guy with more hair on his face than his head even rising to his feet. Before anyone could start shooting and making things even messier, however, Kara in her Supergirl outfit strode through, her face a blank mask of neutrality.

“Supergirl!” Alex called out, rushing in after her. She stopped for a moment when she noticed others staring at her, hesitating for only a second before marching forward. “ _Please_ , we have to talk about this—”

Kara, nevertheless, continued striding forwards, right towards her. “I can’t,” she said, voice flat. “I can’t talk about it, or be in this place, right now, Alex.”

“Hank was just trying to pro—”

“ _Alex!_ ” Kara snapped, stopping only to glance behind her with a jerky, sharp motion. “Enough. Stop, please.”

Alex paused, her throat bobbing as she took in a breath, her shoulders slumping even while her spine straightened. “Later?” She less asked, more begged, her voice cracked.

Kara glanced away, back towards her. “Later,” she confirmed, before stepping back into her stride, letting it carry her through the length of the canteen and right up to the table they were seated at. “Agent Vasquez,” she said, nodding, Susan blinking up at her before nodding as well. Finally, Kara turned her gaze onto her, eyes flicking over her features rapidly, looking for something, before finally her neutral expression softened. “Addy. I think it’s time we got you home, okay?”

Something soured in her gut. This wasn’t right, Kara was bright and exuberant and loud even when she was Supergirl. This time, though, there was nothing like that, just emptiness and softness that was familiar if distant. She wanted to demand, to know what made her like this, but stopped herself before she could open her mouth. She was tired, Kara was probably tired, something had happened but—but... she couldn’t do anything about it.

Her stomach twisted, ached. She didn’t like this. “Okay,” she finally answered, pushing down on the queasiness in her chest.

* * *

The apartment was dark and cleaned when they got back. Maybe she was just better at noticing differences, but it was clear enough that someone had come through at some point to remove the egg goop and do some rudimentary cleaning. Despite that, in places, she could just barely see boot treads, and in others, objects had been rearranged, possibly because they had been knocked over in the retrieval process. There was no evidence that anything that had happened today had; no open window with Astra, no corpse of a Black Mercy, no egg, no scuffle.

Everything looked completely normal.

Glancing down at her toes, Addy let each one wiggle, feeling the way flesh brushed against flesh.

“Right!” Kara called out, appearing from around the corner of her room, carrying with her a small tower of blankets and pillows. The blanket was on the bottom, looking thick and plush, folded in a rectangle, while about three pillows had been stacked on top of that. “Do you think you’ll need any more than this to sleep?”

Addy stared at it for a moment, glancing between the articles, before shaking her head. “Don’t think so, the blanket looks interesting.”

Kara smiled, though it was brief. Getting home had returned some of the energy she’d lacked at the D.E.O. back, but the difference was still _there_. She’d held back on asking what was causing her to act this way, or why, but... well, her impulses were getting the worse of her, especially now that she was sitting down on something comfortable and it was just so easy to let her head go all fuzzy and soft. Blinking a few times, Addy glanced at the clock; it was close to 1AM, late even for Taylor.

“The blanket’s one of the ones my adoptive mother got me—Eliza Danvers,” Kara explained without prompting, coming to a halt just next to her and letting the bundle of soft fabric plunk down on the couch. “The blanket is weighted a bit, though I’m not sure if you’ll notice, and reinforced. I used to have nightmares and I kept shredding the blankets, and she came up with... well, _this_. Or, well she and Jeremiah did. The pillows are just normal though, so don’t grab them too hard or you’ll rip them apart.”

Addy reached out, dragged her fingers over the wrinkles in the bedsheets. They were soft, but not in an unpleasant way, not like cotton swabs. It was soft and silken, almost textureless in the way it sat against her fingers, and it smelt faintly of Kara’s perfume, like she’d used it a while ago, but not so long ago that it was simply a childhood blanket. Glancing up at her, Addy tried to find any concern or weariness in her face and found none. “Are you sure?”

Kara smiled then, but it was sad. “I kept it around because after Jeremiah died it was all I had left to remember him by,” she explained, reaching down herself to begin moving the pillows to the other end of the couch, piling them until they padded the area where cushion transitioned into the hard fabric armrest. She tugged on the blanket too, pulled it until it unfurled in full and reached over to slowly drape the article around Addy’s shoulders, her fingers warm when they brushed against the skin of her cheeks. “I think he’d be very proud of me if he saw that I was passing on a blanket that helped me so much to someone else, you know? It’s a little sad to be giving it up, but it’s yours now, Addy, for as long as you need it, and even longer then.”

Addy swallowed, scrunching her nose when the lump in her throat didn’t abate. Her throat almost ached with it, she reached up, brushing fingertips over thankfully dry cheekbones, but she just had to be sure. The blanket was heavy, enough that it was noticeable, but not so much it stopped her movement. It felt warm, heavy on her shoulders, grounded her somehow, in a way that other things hadn’t. She breathed in, felt her lungs fill with air, then out. This felt good, this felt nice, she felt whole and safe and like she could tuck her head under the blanket and the entire world wouldn’t be able to find or affect her. It felt like a shield, and she liked that.

The sound of fabric shifting drew her attention, her eyes tracking over to Kara, who had decided to slump down into her chair. Bringing her hand up, she brushed shaky fingers through her hair, not paying any attention to her. She reached for the remote after another moment, bringing it up and turning the television on, some sort of cartoon about a large, red-coloured robot striding across a ruined landscape flickering into view. Her cartoon channel got weird after midnight, apparently, not that she minded, especially with the volume so low she had to strain her ears to hear it.

“You wanna watch this?” Kara asked after another moment, clicking a button and causing a small menu to pop up at the bottom of the screen, displaying future shows to be broadcast. Flicking her eyes down, Addy briefly caught sight of the title of the show before Kara could scroll away from it, an ‘Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone’. “Because, it’s okay if you do, I’m just... sticking around until you doze off, okay? But, I thought maybe I could change it to something less apocalyptic.”

Addy blinked again, this time too slowly. Her head felt fuzzier than normal, she was warm and comfortable and found herself rocking back and forth a little, the motions comfortable. “M’not,” she stumbled, not liking the way the words came out unclear. She’d have to work on that, impeccable pronunciation was important. “I’m not,” she repeated, just for clarity. “You can change it, I just like the colours and noises of the shows.”

“Bright, right?” Kara said knowingly. Addy found herself nodding, letting the weight of her body tip her over to the side, the lack of a right arm leaving her left side slightly unbalanced. She landed against the cushion of the couch with a thump, wormed her way up the length of it and tucked her face into the crisp white pillows. They smelled like fake flowers in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, and the pillowcases were smooth and silky enough that brushing her cheek across the surface felt nice, soothing, the relative cool of the pillows feeling like a respite from the heat of the blanket.

The channel flickered, changed over. On it, a man with a deep, English accent documented the behavioural patterns of the alpine ibex, from the way they frolicked and hopped and did all other sorts of jumpy things. She felt her eyes stutter for a moment, blinking only to find that the documentary had skipped forward to talking about goats, her place gone. Her eyes felt heavy, weighed down, she blinked again and glanced around, not finding Kara in her seat. She slumped a bit, not finding the energy to go looking, and tried to watch the documentary again, letting the warmth suck her in, the sound of his voice, slow and smooth and pleasant on the ears.

Another blink. Kara was back, floating in through the window in her Supergirl uniform. Their eyes met for a moment, Kara jolting slightly before relaxing. The show on the television wasn’t even the one they’d started with, the English accent replaced for something more Irish, talking about the creation of Earth instead of the mating habits of mountain-dwelling fauna.

“Kara?” Addy rasped, her tongue flicking out mostly on instinct to wet her lips.

Kara wilted, glanced back towards the window she had come in from, before finally closing it. “It’s okay Addy, you can go back to sleep. I just had to see someone off.”

She had to know. Kara’s behaviour had been bothering her, had been making something awful twist in her chest. “Who?”

Kara paused, visibly swallowed, and then gave her a sad smile. “Aunt Astra,” she explained quietly, fingers pulling together. “She was killed today, and it’s part of my people’s culture to send their caskets off to meet Rao, the god - and sun - of our system. My boss was responsible for her death, and... it’s why I wanted to leave the D.E.O. so quickly.”

The feeling came back, a sharp pang in her chest. It made her queasy, ill, made her want to apologize. She searched for a moment, reached out to her memories, but was met only with the constant flicker of how Taylor had been after Annette’s death, how Danny had been, how _Kara_ was. She pushed them aside, delved into it, tried to draw out the meaning of the feeling, the dull ache of something bitter and shameful.

It came to her a second later. She felt guilty.

For what? For not stepping in, for not asking to help when they would’ve told her not to? She just wanted to exist, why was she feeling guilty? There was no rational reason, and yet, even knowing that, even knowing the source of it, she still felt it. It made her chest hurt, made her want to do anything to help, it itched at the back of her skull and almost managed to banish the fatigue, but not enough.

Kara’s fingers brushed over the crown of her hair, gently smoothing over her hair. Addy felt herself almost melt.

“I’ll be okay,” Kara said gently. “I didn’t think I’d get attached to her, she did bad things, but... I felt like I could’ve brought her to the light. She wasn’t committed to her cause, not like she had been. I’m just sad, you know? She was kin, and now she’s gone.”

Addy understood, but she also didn’t. Taylor would understand, and she had enough Taylor in her to get some of it, but the concept of kin to her was foreign, alien. Kin ate kin, kin did anything the gestalt intelligence wanted. Kin ate planets and culled populations who knew too much, who had unwanted complications, who they could not exploit for information or resources. She understood family, understood the loss of it, and yet didn’t.

Her eyes shut, too heavy. Kara’s fingers kept brushing over her head, gently smoothing the curls down.

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

* * *

Addy jolted awake with a heave, her vision swimming as it adjusted to the light. The memories were on the tip of her tongue, not present enough to be knowable, but there. She had been thinking of something, what had she been thinking of? It had been about Taylor, right? She was almost certain it had been but nothing else was clear and she didn’t like that she—

“Addy?” Kara called out, head peeking around the corner. Addy felt herself relax back into the couch, the feeling of sweat slicking the back of her neck unpleasant. The memories trickled out, away, lost to the ether despite her nominally perfect recall of everything that had happened since she’d first woken up. She breathed out, low and slow, tried to get her heart to stop pounding relentlessly against her chest.

“Sorry,” she rasped out, blinking once as Kara’s pyjama-clad figure blurred and then reappeared a breath later with a glass of water that she very carefully placed on the coffee table an arm’s length away. “I think I might’ve just had a dream.”

Kara gave her a curious look, brow ticked up. “Is that not normal?”

Reaching out, Addy took the glass and tipped it back, feeling the water pour into her mouth and down her throat, an unpleasant flood of fluid slicking against flesh. She hated it, but it made her throat less sore, less dry. “No. I don’t remember it either, and I have perfect recall.” Or at least, she thought she did.

“Just give it time,” Kara said slowly, walking back towards her bedroom. Her voice had a knowing tone to it, something about it spoke of experience and understanding, and it somehow made it both worse and better. “Dreams will fade, you’ll feel better soon.”

Addy breathed out again, focused on the feeling of taking air in and out. It did help relax her, and the panic from before did fade, though not entirely. She didn’t like dreaming, though the fact that her head felt alive and not smothered by fog meant that she did, however, like _sleep_. Maybe she could find a way to avoid dreaming? After all, dreaming was just important to people who didn’t have a consciousness capable of working through its problems outside of select moments of unconsciousness.

Yeah, dreamless sleep sounded nice. She wanted that.

“We’ll go out tomorrow to get your stuff put together,” Kara began, startling Addy not for the first time. She glanced up, catching Kara quickly slipping a pastel-pink cardigan over a white blouse and black slacks that had at some point replaced the sheep-patterned pyjamas she wore. “But today I have work, you’ll be fine on your own, I think. Actually, can you tell me the house rules I told you about yesterday?”

Blinking away the sleep behind her eyes and the gunk more literally on them, Addy took another reluctant sip of water, her entire body almost vibrating with a need for it. “Don’t let people into the house if you don’t tell me they’re coming. If an alien forces its way into the house, call you, if a human does, call the police. Don’t use the oven, try to eat three meals a day, and do not break anything.”

Kara smiled brightly at her, looking almost like herself before her face slipped into something like understanding. “Speaking of food,” she started, slipping out of the bedroom area and making her way towards the kitchen, or more specifically, the fridge. Cracking it open, Kara reached inside and took out what looked like an oversized, very tall mug filled with a honey-coloured slurry, a white container with ‘GO YOGURT’ written across it in bright, all-capital colourful letters, and a small assortment of saran-wrapped granola bars. Walking back over, she placed each of them carefully down on the otherwise empty surface of the coffee table.

“These,” she began, motioning towards the three bits of what Addy was assuming - and hoping, her stomach was very taut with what she had come to realize was hunger - was food. “Are my secret to keeping myself from starving to death.” She reached down, tapping her finger against the yogurt tub. “This is the most calorie-intensive yogurt on the market. I have to have Alex order it on Amazon for me because nobody stocks it outside of expensive fitness stores. I store them in the dozens and I go through about one per day, so I’ll have to double up for you in all likelihood.” Next, she tapped the granola bars. “These are homemade, specifically by Alex, though the recipe is Eliza’s. It’s basically a brick of pure calories, if you feel hungry, eat half of one, it’ll be about five hundred. I don’t know how it works, don’t ask me, my sister is a wizard.” Finally, she tapped the side of the huge container. “This is a protein smoothie, it tastes like grass-covered honey and is the only reason I can keep upright at work. I can make more for you, it is one of the only things I can make because fire isn’t required, but it’s high-calorie, like everything else, and makes you feel full really quickly, so be careful if you eat it.”

Addy had a lot of questions. She was not aware Alex practiced a magical religion, nor was she aware that something the size of her palm could contain five hundred calories, but despite all of that, they did look appealing, for better or for worse.

“I want you to choose one of these to eat today, okay? They’re still going through the tests they ran on you to find out where the acceptable caloric intake range would be. Considering you’re not falling over from starvation, I doubt you’re as bad as me, but you probably still need to eat a lot, sedentary or not.”

Glancing between them, Addy struck off the smoothie immediately. Liquids were gross. The granola bars looked appetizing, but she didn’t like how dry they looked, which really only left the food equivalent _of_ a liquid. “Yogurt,” she said, flicking her eyes up. Kara smiled at her, beamed really, and Addy felt that awful guilt gnaw at her throat again. She had a bad feeling about what was going to happen, she should’ve stepped in, Kara looked so sad and she kept reminding her of Taylor after Annette and Taylor after Annette was why she existed but she was also _miserable_ and it was awful.

Kara swept up the other two, walking back over to the refrigerator and putting it away before closing the door. “I have about thirty minutes before I need to get to work,” Kara explained, walking back over with little too much speed in her step to call it slow. Instead of stopping just shy of the coffee table like she thought she would, however, Kara continued past it, coming to a halt next to the bookshelf just in front of one of the curtains that slightly blocked off the archway into her bedroom. On top of the bookcase was a cardboard box, a small pile of files, and an envelope, all of which she similarly picked up and carefully made her way over, placing it down on the coffee table. “So we need to go over this quick, okay?”

Addy glanced at the box, the papers, the yogurt, and then Kara. This _was_ a lot, but she could deal with it. Doing a lot of things simultaneously was kind of her thing. Finally, she nodded, trying to put some resolve into the gesture.

Kara smiled, though a bit more timidly, with less exposed teeth and bright cheer. “First thing,” she began, reaching out to swipe the envelope from the top of the pile, handing it over. Addy took it, flicked her thumb under the little bit of it that hadn’t been perfectly sealed, and pulled up, tearing the top open just like she remembered. “Congratulations, you are now a citizen of earth!”

True to what she said, inside was literally that: an American birth certificate, a social insurance card, and a personal ID. Written on all of them was ‘Adeline Taylor Queen’, with ‘Addy’ left as an alias on one of the files. She had apparently been born and raised in a town just outside of Boston by the name of Brookline. She’d gone to school, graduated top of her year from the local High School with proficient grades in mathematics, sciences, and literature. They’d even managed to get a picture of her somehow, her face blank and staring directly into the center of the camera with her hair framed around her ears, the picture cutting off just below her shoulders.

She wasn’t sure how to feel about the middle name or the fact that her ‘true’ name was Adeline, but then Addy was her name and if people could say their name was something different to the thing they were born with, so could she.

The bundle of papers was placed down in front of her, looking about twelve to fifteen pages thick all told. “This,” Kara explained, tapping the top, which was blank for all but ‘D.E.O.’ in large, blocky capital letters. “Is a proficiency test to understand where you are relative to humans in terms of mathematical, technological, and other information knowledge. I’m not sure what’s in it, I didn’t check, but they want it back as soon as possible because they want you to find a job to begin integrating into.”

Dropping the envelope to the side, Addy picked at the corner of the page, frowning a bit at it as she flipped it over and was met with what was very obviously rote mathematics. Mostly just simple algebra that most humans would learn in university; nothing she would sweat at. “Alright,” she eventually said, glancing back up at Kara, who was giving the cardboard box a long look. It wasn’t like a conventional cardboard box, not a perfect square, but more of a very short, very wide rectangle.

“This, meanwhile, is the laptop they’re providing you. It's yours now, try not to break it, and it has already been connected to the wifi if what Alex said was true, so all you need to do is turn it on and then plug it in to recharge it. It should have a booklet you can look through to find out how to operate it if you’re not sure.”

Taylor had a lot of memories of laptops and computers. It had been, for a while, her passion, what she wanted to be when she grew up. She wanted to either code for a living or teach coding if at all possible. Even after she’d ended up turning herself in, that want had stayed consistent, and only really changed as the time got ever-closer to the end of the world. She’d stayed with it, too, taking courses and classes about it, learning as much as she reasonably could, though Addy hadn’t really looked too deeply into those memories with as much frequency as she had with the more emotional ones. She would have to now, though.

The guilt was back now, though, as strong and potent as ever. She felt herself tense up, felt her fingers tighten a bit. Astra was dead, she did nothing, and now she was being rewarded for it. She knew, rationally, that that wasn’t the case, that she couldn't have done anything, but something about the situation was too close to home. Really, everything was, everything felt like she was watching Taylor’s memories play out again. Maybe she didn’t even feel that guilty about not acting, she wasn’t sure, but it somewhat felt like she was guilty about what would happen _after_ , about what she’d be forced to watch again.

“Why are you a hero?” The words came impulsively, blurted before she could stop them. Kara froze, opened and shut her mouth for a long moment before fully turning to her, focused on her with an intensity she hadn’t seen in Kara before.

Kara breathed in, then out. “I was sent to Earth to protect my cousin. My planet was destroyed, and in the process, I got trapped in this part of space that doesn’t really follow conventional laws of spacetime. By the time I actually arrived, Kal-El—my cousin—was already grown up and... he didn’t need me. He had already become Superman. I grew up being told to hide my powers, and the one time I didn’t ended up with my adoptive father turning up dead a few years later. I... both resented my powers and really wanted to use them. I am powerful under this sun, so, so powerful, I can do so much, but I just... _didn’t_. I hid who I was, what I wanted to _be_ , while my cousin did what I should’ve been doing for him. Until the world forced my hand, my sister’s plane had gone down and she was going to die if I didn’t interfere, so I did.”

There was a short pause. Addy digested that, compared it to what she knew of Taylor’s decision to become a hero, which had been far less idealistic, far more driven by a sense of duty and requirement. She might’ve felt guilty for what she did, might’ve gone on to seek atonement, but the comparison was only surface-deep.

“Then, I found my purpose like that. My life had felt hollow, half-fulfilled, I had rejected so much of my Kryptonian heritage to just _fit in_ , to feel normal. I didn’t want to be normal anymore, and maybe that was selfish, but... I wanted to be abnormal, I wanted to help others, I wanted to make people feel safe.” Another pause, heavier, Kara stared at her with lidded eyes and a warmth that Addy felt completely unprepared for. “So, I did, and I continue to. You don’t have an obligation to follow in my footsteps, Addy, but I felt obligated to do so because I had the power to do so. My powers let me help people, and to not help them was a decision I just couldn’t handle, so I won’t. That’s why I became a hero, that’s why I am Supergirl.”

They really were nothing alike. Part of Taylor’s rationale for it was that she’d always wanted to be a hero, always wanted to help, but to a degree when she had become a hero, some of it had been primarily driven by the need for the resources they provided. She could stop the end of the world far better if she had help, after all. They were superficially similar, doing the right thing when they needed to, but only in the abstract, only so far as they could be as two very different people.

Kara glanced away, up at the clock, and froze. “Shit,” she cursed, which was new because Kara _did not curse_. “I gotta get to work. Are you okay with people coming over tonight for game night? It’s totally fine if you want me to cancel, you just arrived and it—”

“It’s okay,” Addy said, still processing, still working through her thoughts. They were different, yes, similar, also yes, but so different. She needed to focus on that, Kara wasn’t Taylor, she shouldn’t feel guilty about Kara’s future because Kara _was not Taylor_ , would not fall apart as Taylor had. It didn’t make the guilt go away, didn’t even diminish it, but the thought was at least a comforting one. “They can come over.”

Kara beamed another smile in her direction. “Do the worksheets! I’ll see you at around five!”

* * *

The worksheets had turned out to be a trivial if welcome distraction. None of them were difficult, and they had all been framed in ways that let her explain her reasoning even if she didn’t use what she thought was conventional human practices to reach her answers. It took her thirty minutes, and most of that had been trying to figure out how to explain to people a mathematical concept that didn’t exist in conventional human mathematics yet, which she had managed, at the very least.

She had turned the television back to cartoons shortly after Kara left, ramped up the volume until tinny voices and dramatic sound effects until it had drowned out the memories of Kara’s speech about being a hero. Her laptop was set up, it wasn’t hard to figure out after digging through her brain for the relevant information. The laptop UI was a bit different, going from LiteTech to Microsoft, but that wasn’t hard to acclimate to in the same way that the keyboard layout had been. A few keys had been changed around, but so long as she looked at her hand while she typed, she was fine. A bit slow, but fine.

Eating the yogurt had been another slow process. It wasn’t _as_ watery as she’d been expecting, tasted nice and had a very smooth texture, but she didn’t really like it? There was nothing particularly _wrong_ about it, and the texture wasn’t offensive, but by the time she had cleared out the entire tub of it, she kinda wished she had just gone with the granola bars.

Glancing up at the clock, Addy felt her face cramp. It was still only two in the afternoon, even after spending hours finding out there was an entire genre of music that was called _noise_ and was wonderful and amazing and should be significantly more popular. Time was slow, had been since she’d fused fully with Taylor’s body, but even that was a bit much.

* * *

People took a lot of photos of their cats. Not that she was complaining, cats were delightful creatures who were soft and made a lot of odd noises. She liked geese more for their noises, the throaty honks that bellowed out of their beaks like little car horns, but cats were still good, especially when they made that chirping noise.

She could do without the people who left weirdly-spelled comments beneath them though. What on earth was a ‘uwu’? Why were they everywhere? It was just a _cat_. Was it some type of religious thing?

* * *

She wanted Kara. It was half-past four in the evening and she should be home soon but she was bored and the television had nothing on and she wanted to be around Kara because Kara was bright and cheery even if she made her feel guilty about something she _could not control_ and hated the fact that she was guilty but—but...

She wanted Kara.

* * *

“I’m home!”

Addy nearly jolted to her feet, stopped only by her stranglehold on the couch. She hadn’t really left the couch outside of to use the washroom and get another drink, and had found a comfortable little nook inside of it. Of course, she’d had to dislodge the cushion a tiny bit so she could fit her rear into the little groove and feel the way the scratchy fabric pressed against her, feel the little coiled up springs, but it was very comfortable.

Kara sort of stared at her for a moment, glancing between the done bundle of papers, her computer which was still playing that low trill of noise music, to her, half-stuffed into the couch, and then back again. “Did you have a good day?” Kara finally asked, shucking her pink outer shirt and leaving it hanging on one of the chairs in the dining table.

“I learned a lot,” she said instead of ‘no I wished you were here but I also didn’t’, because that felt a bit too much for her. Kara just smiled, ignorant, and Addy let the moment pass.

“That’s good! You got the worksheets done, too, which is a bonus. Now, I need to know, what do you know about Settlers of Catan?”

* * *

“This is Winn Schott, he works at CatCo as an IT guy,” Kara smoothly introduced, motioning towards the man in question. He was wearing a cardigan over a simple white shirt, some slacks, and some converse shoes the colour of the sky. He smiled awkwardly at her, a smile that wobbled a bit when she just cocked her head to one side, staring at him curiously. Finally, after a few more seconds of awkward silence, he very nervously extended his hand for a shake.

Addy took it, firmly shaking it up and down. “Hello, I’m Addy.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Winn replied, his voice as wobbly as his awkward smile.

“Well,” Kara began, startling them both. She shot them a look, like she shouldn’t be startled when someone silently appears right beside her and speaks, which was rude. “You’ll have to learn a lot, in any case, since you’ve both been paired off for tonight.”

Winn shot her another shaky smile, one she very tentatively tried to return. From the way his smile went from shaky to actually somewhat genuine, it probably worked.

* * *

“This is James Olsen, he—”

“Shoots photos,” Addy interrupted. Because he did, because one of the first things she’d looked up was famous photographers and James was on just about every list. His photos were all vibrant, even over a screen they were all perfectly framed and colourful. She especially liked his work done on Superman, who he liked to capture mid-flight, with the reds contrasting the blues, but he also had done Superman in more scenic shots, rural areas where the greens made for a bright, wonderful comparison to the reds and blues.

“—Alright, you already know. Cool. This is his _girlfriend_ , Lucy Lane,” Kara said, stressing the word ‘girlfriend’ like it might actually mean something to her. Addy just shot her a blank look, one Kara ignored until something like comprehension flicked across her face and tension Addy hadn’t noticed was there bled back out of her.

Turning to the woman in question, Addy held out her hand for a shake. “Your boyfriend makes very colourful photos,” she said, in lieu of a conventional greeting.

Lucy took her hand, a sly smile pulling across her face, some sort of in-joke she didn’t understand in all likelihood. “It’s one of his redeeming qualities,” she confessed, and somewhere behind her, Addy could hear Alex snort.

* * *

“I have this monopoly card.”

The rest of the table stared at her, their puny villages meek and incomparable to her own villages, stalwart, well-built, properly administrated with giant roads. She could see Winn sitting beside her, looking like he was on the edge of vibrating out of his seat. They had been a good duo, working together, though he had quickly realized she was far better at micromanagement and figuring out how to best exploit resources, even if those resources were her enemies.

“Give me all of your ore.”

* * *

“Here, uhm, here’s my username on twitter and stuff,” Winn said, shoving a ripped-off piece of paper into her hand. True to his word, there were several usernames and ways to contact him. She stared blankly at it.

“I heard you didn’t have a phone,” he started, sounding like he was babbling. “A—and I’m not, trying to hit on you, or ask you out.”

“That is good,” Addy said, glancing up after another moment. “I do not like men.”

Winn smiled, though it was a bit weak. “So you’re gay?”

“I don’t like women either.” Really, she’d prefer it if people understood that. Apparently liking someone’s photography was enough to make people think she was interested in them physically, which was patently untrue. Fleshy bits could remain tucked away, thank you very much.

“Oh, so you’re asexual!”

“I’ll endeavour to look up what that is tonight after you and Alex leave.”

Alex snorted, again. She had done a lot of that, though for a while she’d remained quiet and focused on glaring at her. How should Addy know that she had an entire hand full of ore? It wasn’t like _Kara_ got mad at her, and Alex had been on her team.

* * *

The apartment was finally quiet.

Lying down on the couch, Addy stared up at the ceiling, fingers tucked against the little grooves between each cushion. Kara was in her room, either sleeping or trying to, and the television had been turned back on to the documentary channel and turned low. She couldn’t even really make out the words the person was saying, but it was soothing even despite that.

Addy blinked, long and slow, tried to let her eyes shut on their own like they had the night before. She was still awake, still aware. The apartment still smelled vaguely of takeout, as a large order of potstickers and pizza had been the dinner. Pizza was fine, a lot of different textures and in one instance the wonderful addition of pineapple which gave everything a very sweet and salty taste. Potstickers had been less great, but workable, she didn’t really like how the dumpling itself tasted or felt when she bit into it, though the filling was still nice. Kara really liked them, so she hadn’t said as much, but if push came to shove it wasn’t like she couldn’t eat them.

Wiggling her tones one by one, Addy forced her eyes shut. She didn’t want to dream again, but she had to sleep. The guilt had waxed and waned throughout the day, coming and going seemingly with her mood. She wanted to do more, she wanted to do _something_ , to do anything with what she had. She wasn’t at fault, none of it was, but, again, it would appear that her brain had other opinions on the matter. She shouldn’t feel bad, shouldn’t feel like she was watching Taylor happen again in slow motion, but she did, and regardless of how much she told herself otherwise, the feeling always snuck back in.

She was tired, but she wasn’t.

Was this what Taylor had felt like, near the beginning?

(She didn’t know. Didn’t think she ever truly would, really, even with the memories, full of emotion and texture and feeling, she knew better than to assume she understood what Taylor had been thinking at any given time.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter really fought me, sorry about the somewhat fragmentary quality of the later bits. I couldn't find a way to include them more seamlessly, despite them being needed.


	6. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 4

Factually, Addy had understood that California would have a different climate to Brockton Bay. It wasn’t as though Taylor had never left the east coast of America; in the later years of her life - for however short it had been - she had spent most of it abroad, juggled between one PRT branch after another. She had never made it this far out west, sure, but she had done a stint in a part of Texas at one point, and the weather there had been just as bad as the weather in National City.

Still, the fact that Alex had to turn the air conditioning to high to beat back the mid-February heat was bothering her. It wasn’t the only thing bothering her, to be fair, the silence in the car, the fact that Kara didn’t seem to be able to even so much as look at her sister for long periods of time—those bothered her too, but the heat was definitely a contributor. It didn’t help any that the vehicle wasn’t the one Alex had been driving before, instead traded out for a large nondescript van coloured uniform black with thick, heavy tires and an engine that almost roared when it picked up speed. It wasn’t clunky or anything, it drove smoothly down the highway and turned well enough, but it still felt vaguely... off.

Everything did, to one degree or another. The lingering guilt, the awkward silences that had come in the hours after everyone left post-game night, the fact that Kara had gone sullen and quiet after returning from seeing her aunt off in what she had figured out was a Kryptonian funeral ritual. Everyone was tense, quiet, and Addy was not a huge fan of the quiet. It gave her time to think, mostly in circles, and thinking wasn’t doing a whole lot of good for her right about now, which was something of a novel experience.

“Where are we going to first, again?” Alex asked, voice abrupt and sudden. Addy could barely see Kara jerk subtly out of the corner of her eye, her face scrunching. “I know we’re going to the mall, before you say it, I just need to know what store we’ll be heading into first.”

For a moment, Kara said nothing. She simply stared at her sister blankly, uncomprehending, and Addy could relate somewhat. She was pretty sure Alex _did_ know where they were going first, but for whatever reason she was pretending not to. Feigning ignorance had always been a clever method of lying to other people, but it felt unnecessary and abrupt in this situation. If Alex had problems with the silence in a similar vein to herself, why hadn’t she just turned on the radio or something? It _was_ right there, and it wasn’t like anyone would’ve objected.

“We’re going to American Apparel first,” Kara finally said, emotions slipping back into her tone, sounding almost halfway excited. “Then we’ll be stopping over at the Foot Locker just next to it, before moving on to the IKEA they’re both connected to. Hopefully by then we’ll have a full wardrobe and shoes for Addy, so we can focus entirely on getting stuff for the bedroom and then finish it off with getting some essentials, toothbrushes, toothpaste, some make-up, that sort of thing.”

Alex relaxed, her shoulders smoothing out visibly. Addy felt her stomach tug a bit, she still wasn’t perfectly comfortable with all of this, she knew rationally she’d have to get clothes eventually, and she had even been a bit excited for it. Despite the fact that she had enjoyed the sweats and flip-flops - which had been traded out for a pair of capris, shoes that didn’t _quite_ fit, and a baggy flannel button-up shirt, all gifts from Alex, who refused to clarify who she got them from - they had been a way to avoid addressing the proverbial elephant in the room: did she dress like _Taylor_ , or did she dress like she wanted to?

Now, she accepted Taylor’s faults for what they were, but if there had been anything in hindsight she disliked, it was Taylor’s near-rabid avoidance of anything more colourful than off-navy blue. She _liked_ colours, a lot, she liked how they looked on her skin, she liked how they made her feel, she liked how she could reflect how she felt _in_ what she wore. She liked the idea of mixing and matching and all the fun that came with that.

But Taylor hadn’t dressed that way, hadn’t _acted_ that way either.

“—Alex,” Kara’s voice pitched up just high enough to interrupt her train of thought, bordering on a yell. Addy blinked, glanced between the two sisters, who had reverted to their prior tense stand-off. “I don’t need the D.E.O.’s _handouts_ , I can afford this—”

“We both know Cat Grant pays you a fraction of what you should be with your hours and duties,” Alex bit back, sounding exasperated. “The D.E.O. is willing to help with funding, Kara, you’re paying for an entirely new wardrobe, several pairs of shoes, likely a lot of other expenses, things that would cut into your savings. Why are you being so stubborn about this?”

“You should know why,” Kara muttered back, folding her arms across her chest, one hand lacing into the material of her seatbelt, tightening down around it until her knuckles whitened.

Alex made a low noise, a gravelly sigh. “I don’t, Kar—”

“They can’t pay off my aunt’s death, Alex!” Kara snapped.

The vehicle went silent. Addy glanced away from the sisters, down to her red shoes with white laces, the way her toes were cramped inside. She tried to focus on them, to avoid the low ache of guilt that crawled back into her chest, to little effect. She didn’t want to be in the vehicle right now, felt the impulse to pop the door and let gravity take the metaphorical wheel, but stopped herself. She had to get used to those—intrusive thoughts weren’t natural to her. Or, well, they hadn’t been, not until recently.

“It’s not like that,” Alex spoke, her voice soft, gentle. “I’m sorry you thought it was, but this is me dipping into the fund we established for Addy. It’s not a lot, you’ll have to pay for some of the things we’re picking up, but you won’t be putting yourself into debt for housing an alien _we_ asked you to.”

It did not help that Addy rather profoundly disliked being spoken of as if she wasn’t in the back seat. To make a point, she - gently, because having full control over her body was easy but it still felt very weird having to be gentle to reach the strength levels of an average human - drove the toe of her foot into the underside of Alex’s seat in front of her, prompting an odd, surprised squeaky noise to escape her. She glanced up just in time to see Alex stare at her, bewildered, from the rearview mirror.

Alex didn’t apologize, but the way she flushed and glanced away probably meant she got the point she was trying to get across.

“I’ll think about it,” Kara finally hedged, each word slow, sounding like she was struggling to voice them. “Alright?”

Alex glanced back towards the stretch of highway, the mall - a long collection of large buildings, dominated by a single, unreasonably large Walmart - coming slowly into view on the other side of the hill. “That’s all I can ask for.”

* * *

Whoever invented chino pants should’ve been made an international hero. They were _delightful_ , and she really did like that word, which meant its usage in this exact situation was _very important_ , because chino pants were, with few exceptions, among some of the few types of pants that came in more colours that off-black _and_ she could tolerate on her legs for any length of time. Jeans, for example, had different colours and styles but felt like she was rubbing sandpaper over her skin and she’d nearly shed them the moment she’d forced them on.

Kara, apparently, had similar experiences; she had explained that while she wore the style of clothing she did in part to avoid comparisons to being Supergirl, it had actually mostly been a result of her enhanced sensory abilities making a lot of clothing types unpleasant to wear for any number of reasons. Alex hadn’t even seemed phased by her complaints about the jeans, which gave some credence to the explanation, though both Alex and Kara had tried to get her to buy at least a few skirts, not that she’d given in to their demands. Skirts were weird, too airy, and they rustled against her skin too much to be anything but unwearable.

Admittedly, she had given in to some of their requests. They had refused to let her fill out a portion of her wardrobe with khaki shorts, even though they were very efficient and had big pockets. They also had forced her to buy actual shoes, not just flip-flops - though she’d scored three pairs on clearance, each one in a different animal print: tiger, zebra and dalmatian - and so she’d ended up with two pairs of high-tops, one red and one blue, and a small pile of multicoloured laces Alex had offered as a compromise when she’d gotten frustrated with the lack of other available colours.

The rest of her wardrobe reflected her inability to live up to Taylor’s expectations when it came to apparel. She _had_ tried, mind you, she had a few pairs of white and black pants and shirts, largely at the recommendation of Kara, who explained they worked as a way to unify outfits, but everything else? Multicoloured. She had a shirt in at _least_ every colour, same with pants, her socks were just the same. Her jackets included a cherry-red raincoat, a neon-blue zip-up sweater, and a few others of equally bright colouration. She’d even gotten a few hats that she’d enjoyed the shape and colour of, though she was more partial to the pageboy hat that was this off-red that reminded her of wine stains more than anything else.

She really wanted to go back to the van and try a lot of it on. She had gotten the chance to try them on in the abstract when she was choosing, it had been why they’d spent nearly three hours in that store, going over clothing, but she hadn’t really got a chance to try on matching pairs of anything, just single articles of clothing. But, of course, she couldn’t, because despite the hours that had passed, despite the constant bickering and Kara’s eventual tired agreement to having some of the trip paid for by the D.E.O., they still weren’t done.

Now, Addy was _not_ intimidated by the IKEA. She couldn’t be. It wasn’t a death trap or a store intentionally designed to cause discomfort, it was very clearly just trying to show off their curiously-named furniture and other non-essential decorations. It was just a store, but it was a store in the same way that the Walmart near the front of the mall was a store: impossibly large and maze-like. IKEA was easily the second largest store in the building and unlike the other stores, which had carefully designed themselves to be made up of rows-upon-rows of goods and services, easily navigable and comprehensible, IKEA was designed by someone who likely moonlighted as a crop circle enthusiast.

“...It should be around here somewhere,” Kara muttered, glancing up towards one of the several, non-specific hanging department signs that they’d placed seemingly at random. The one above them said ‘bedrooms & others’, despite the fact that the aisle Kara had dragged her into was largely cluttered with lamps, a good portion of which being lava lamps. She’d assumed, if only from memory alone, that they had long gone out of style and production - something about them exploding? - but IKEA either had other opinions on the topic or this was just yet another unpleasant change between universes.

They’d been searching for the better part of fifteen minutes now and had seen neither hide nor hair of anything even remotely resembling a bed or a mattress, though they had found several sleeping bags a few minutes back, near the ‘blanket’ aisle which had been made up primarily of _curtains_. Alex had abandoned them nearly the second they’d both entered the shop, scrambling away with the very obvious lie of looking for some new pillows for her bed or whatever, something even Kara had not believed despite several attempts to make sure they both believed that was what she was looking for.

Though that did raise the question of what Alex precisely thought she needed to get when neither of them were looking. Actually, considering they weren’t getting very far in their actual goal, it wasn’t like she had to keep her curiosity to herself or anything. “What do you think Alex is doing?”

Kara glanced back at her from where she was peeking around the corner of the section, apparently still trying to look for whatever qualified as ‘bedroom’ in the section. “Oh, nothing probably,” she airily replied, something like frustration sliding into her tone. “She’s probably just avoiding me. She gets like that when our relationship gets tense. She’s done it since she was a teenager.”

“Why would your relationship be tense?” She did know that it _was_ , mind you. She wasn’t so stupid to not see the weird vein of discomfort between the two of them, but it wasn’t like she totally got the explanation for it.

Kara sighed. “It’s not any problem in _our_ relationship, Addy,” she said, stepping away from the corner of the display area and towards the other, craning her neck around. “We just haven’t had a lot of time to... talk. I know she still works for the D.E.O. and she’s working there for a _good_ reason, but... we haven’t had time to handle the fallout from Astra’s death.”

Oh. Addy blinked slowly, rocking back on her heels in thought. Her chest hurt a little again, a little pang of guilty pain that she wanted to stomp down on, but stopped herself from doing so. The words were already in her head, she’d just been keeping them back, and she was alone with Kara in a place where she wouldn’t be called off at random to go and do things. Alex was avoiding them, she could just... say it. Couldn’t she? “I should have helped.”

Kara froze at that, fingers tensing briefly around the side of one of the shelves, her head slowly turning back around to stare at her. “Addy,” she said, voice gentle, reminiscent of how Annette spoke to Taylor. It made the ache worse. “You didn’t have to.”

Addy felt her throat bob without her consent, something aching and heavy sitting just below where her jaw met neck. “It’s what Taylor would've done,” she cut back in, and the worst part was that she wasn’t _wrong_. Taylor was just that type of person, especially after they’d connected, after she’d given her powers. She would go out of her way to help, couldn’t be relegated to some secondary or tertiary position, to have no influence over something she cared even passingly for. Taylor would’ve helped, would’ve stepped in, would’ve stopped Astra’s death and made none of this tension exist, none of these _problems_ and _conflicts_. She would’ve fixed things, or died trying.

Kara sent her a sad, weary smile. It was genuine if thin, like she had to force the expression to her face despite feeling that way. “Addy,” she repeated, voice quiet, almost hoarse. “You’re not Taylor.”

The words stung more than they should’ve, because Kara was right. She _wasn’t_ Taylor, she was... partially Taylor, in theory, pieces of Taylor glued together the non-person she had been before, bridges to connect parts of herself that hadn’t been personality traits until she had a personality to work from. She wasn’t Taylor, but some part of her ached to _be_ her regardless. The guilt churned harder, she reached up preemptively, fingers brushing over the wet collecting near one of her eyes, sliding over to the other to wipe it away too. She always got like this when she thought about Taylor in anything but passing, the hurt got worse, the guilt got guiltier. She wanted to be Taylor but _she wasn’t Taylor_. She couldn’t be, because she was Addy.

Addy hadn’t been good enough. She hadn’t been good enough to dress like Taylor or act like Taylor or even so much as _think_ like Taylor. She wasn’t Taylor.

Hands brushed over her shoulders, timid and careful, before arms finally coaxed their way around her, closing her into a hug. Kara’s shirt felt rough against her cheek, not enough to be unpleasant, but textured in a way that most of her clothing wasn’t. It smelled good, rose-scented, she thought, or at least floral, but not overpowering as a lot of perfumes were. It was lingering, distant.

“It’s okay, Addy,” Kara breathed after a moment, the hug tightening ever-so-slightly. “It’s okay not to be Taylor. I know it hurts, I hurt too, but... it’s okay. It’ll be okay eventually, even if it doesn’t feel like it was now. I know as much, you know? I watched my planet detonate, I found the person I was supposed to take care of already an adult when I arrived. I tried _so hard_ to be Kryptonian and human at the same time, to live both in equal measure, to be what billions of the dead could no longer be. I couldn’t, in the end, but I did find something in between the two, something not entirely human nor Kryptonian, that let me just be...”

A pause. Addy breathed in, tried not to wipe her nose on Kara’s floral-pink shirt, didn’t want to ruin it.

“That let me just be _me_. I’m not sure when you’ll figure that out fully for yourself, but me, Alex, even my friends—Winn, James, all of them. We can help you find that.”

* * *

It took another few hours to leave IKEA, but they did manage to get everything they needed. After the short outburst with Kara, Addy had found herself... not more _relaxed_ , per-se, but more at ease if anything. The tension had still been there, and the guilt was too, but it was weakened for the first time since she’d first identified the feeling, faded into the dull roar of background noise that existed near-constantly in her head.

In the end, they’d decided on a simple single bed and a frame made primarily out of the most durable metal they could find. They got six pillows instead of the original four after she’d found one pillowcase in particular that had been the equivalent of divine to the touch, and she’d ended up not needing any blanket beside one that would go over the mattress itself, pleading her case that the reinforced blanket Kara had given her was more important.

The odd thing was, she hadn’t even been lying. At some point that blanket had become more important, though whether it was when Kara had first rucked it around her shoulders and given her a bright, bittersweet smile, or when she’d told her it would be okay, Addy didn’t know. Didn’t really care, either, because... as odd as it might be, she did believe her. That was odd, too, because part of her mental thought process when tied into the greater whole had been the ongoing notion that eventually they’d figure out how to continue replicating endlessly, that they’d just stumble onto a way to fix everything without a problem, and when she’d fused with Taylor it... the idea had been laughable, a bleak and childish assumption about how the universe worked.

It wasn’t that she didn’t _feel_ hope, but hope on that scale had been juvenile for a while. It didn’t feel quite so juvenile anymore, and maybe Kara telling her that she’d figure out all of her emotions wasn’t on the scale of the goals of the gestalt, the fundamental belief they’d eventually find a way to overcome conventional laws of reality despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, but it felt similar, even if only in the abstract.

Staring at what would now be her room, Addy really tried to take it in. True to her claim, Kara had shoved the living furniture closer towards her actual bedroom, removing one of the cushion-like-seats and putting it away in storage to leave more space. While the majority of the apartment had walls made out of brick, between the brick there were pillar-like bits of beige-coloured stone that gave it more definition, sectioned it off. The dividers they’d picked up were of an identical colour, long panels that now sat in a line from one of the beige quasi-pillar-like-things to another, sectioning off all but a single entry point. Behind the dividers, her bed had been set up beneath one of the two windows her ‘room’ made up, pressed flush against the longest of the two. Her laptop sat at the foot of her bed, opened to youtube, while the rest of her room was filled in mostly by an array of multi-coloured fairy lights, two wardrobes, and a small desk and chair where she could place her laptop.

It wasn’t much, but as Kara had said, it was hers.

Glancing down at her clothes, Addy couldn’t really help the smile that slipped onto her face. That had been one of the first things she’d done when they’d finally arrived home, sweaty and exhausted after the trip. She’d slipped out of Alex’s borrowed clothes - _“Keep them Addy, I sincerely do not want them in my house anymore,” Alex had explained, looking almost frustrated. “They’re an ex’s, he won’t need them anymore.”_ \- and into an outfit that better defined her. Her socks were pastel-blue and striped with white horizontal lines, her pants were a canary-yellow pair of chinos, her shirt a simple t-shirt of an identical colour to her socks, and she’d even stuffed her wine-stain pageboy hat on for good measure, just to complete the look. She looked colourful, _felt colourful_ , and it was a wonderful experience.

Admittedly, in a few hours, she’d have to get out of them to get into her pyjamas and go to sleep, but that was a problem for _future_ Addy, and future Addy could handle that when it came.

Slipping into the little entrance to her sectioned-off room, Addy didn’t bother to keep her ears peeled for sound. Kara and Alex had stepped out a while ago after a whispered argument on the car-ride back. They’d be back when they worked through whatever conversation Kara had implied they needed to after they fought about things. Siblings were still such a weird concept to her, adoptive or not, they cared so much about one another and yet they hardly shared a similar belief between them. Alex was far more utilitarian, willing to do what she needed to, whereas Addy had come to realize Kara was much more hopeful, willing and able to accept that things weren’t going to be easy but fundamentally not someone who would give up the chance at the better ending for something that guaranteed a problem being handled.

Slotting herself down on her bed, Addy found herself bouncing once. Beds were weird, but not unpleasant, they were just effectively massive cushions with springs, and that made them very nice to roll around on. She’d already done that, of course, bouncing and figuring out what parts of her bed felt in what way. Admittedly, she hadn’t indulged in the impulse to jump up and down on it like a trampoline, mostly because her only memories of such a thing involved a significantly younger Taylor and Emma breaking a bed nearly in half when they’d both tried to synchronize their bouncing during a sleepover. It would do nobody any favours if they had to drive the 30-and-a-bit minutes back out to IKEA to awkwardly request another box spring, mattress and frame, least of all her.

Closing her eyes, Addy let herself sink away from her body for a brief moment, to just... float. She had been putting it off for long enough, she’d been awake and active for days without running diagnostics on her coreself to see the degree of changes or interference that would come with accessing it. Thinking back on Kara’s words helped the uncertainty with trying to open the connection again, but it wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of things that could happen the moment she tried to reestablish a full connection with her coreself, among them including her consciousness being ripped out of her head and back into the crystalline mainframe, her head just outright exploding, and other biological failures that her altered genetic makeup, however similar to a human it might be, had on offer.

She still had to do it, though. She could ignore it for the rest of her life, but... part of her didn’t want to, couldn’t imagine it. Her coreself, despite how stifling it might be, was still _her_. She was Addy, not Taylor, not Queen Administrator, but Addy, some sort of fusion of the two. She had to live up to that, clinging too much to being Taylor had its own obvious problems, the guilt, the constant need to act like her despite the fact that Taylor was not there, wouldn’t be there, and wasn’t coming back.

Reaching out to her coreself wasn’t difficult. There was some interdimensional lag, as was expected, but in practice it wasn’t enough to cause any delays. She had shut off a lot of her coreself to preserve energy, the ability to transmit powers included. Reactivating that part of herself wasn’t difficult, though she did wince reflexively as she calculated the roughly three-hundred and twenty-four years of lost power conservation that came with reactivating the hub from its completely dormant state. It wouldn’t cost her anything to keep it in an idling state afterwards, but she really probably should’ve not shut it completely off in the first place, but then at the time she had still been mostly following power saving protocols.

Reaching deeper into the connection, Addy did the metaphysical equivalent of _tugging_. It was hard to explain how sensory her controls had gotten over her powers, she didn’t really process her coreself in terms of logic gates or simple on-and-off states, it was more of a feeling, a tingling, a sense of awareness when it came to how things functioned and if they were on or off. Tugging, she pulled the power distribution network from ‘idle’ to ‘active’, and for a moment nothing happened.

Then, _everything_ did.

Hundreds of sounds - _thoughts_ , her brain-and-coreself processed simultaneously - slammed into focus, jarring for the brief three-point-two seconds it took before the secondary multitasking capabilities of the power kicked into high gear. She ignored the intrusive knowledge spilling into her head, shunted it to the side, and quickly flipped to the diagnostics. She was still locked into the general composition of the power she’d given Taylor to begin with—control and awareness of living beings, tied to a psychic bandwidth, though now that she was in the driver’s seat she was processing the bandwidth more literally, aware of not just things existing, but their thoughts, impulses, state of being. She could modify it, of course, at the moment she was accessing the thoughts and awareness of every living bug within 3 and a half blocks of herself, but a quick _twist_ and she changed the focus of the power away from bugs and to humans. The range shrunk massively, of course, from 3 and a half blocks to barely a hundred feet, but that much proved her right. She had access to the generalized _type_ of Taylor’s power, but could—

— _a flash of a sword sliding through a woman’s back, a screaming guilt that stabbed into her head. A man with green skin, then brown skin, taking the fall. More guilt, watching Kara grow cold and distant towards J’onn -_ ** _Hank_** _\- and imagining that it would happen to her if only she knew that she was the one who_ —

Addy slammed the doors shut, forcing the nexus back to idle. Her breath was coming in roving gasps, thick in her chest, her heart slamming against her ears. She shut her eyes, brought shaky hands up to push over her ears as she tried to work through what she just felt, what she just _experienced_. Those were Alex’s thoughts, her consciousness, her guilt and shame and the topmost layer of her brain being broadcast back at her. Broadcast was a good word, too, as that’s what she had been using to project her psychic link to begin with, broadcast wasn’t just relegated to intershard communication, like it was with the host of Broadcast, every power generally used it to access different parts of their abilities and only left open ports to be accessed in the event of a cluster trigger event or for other emergency broadcasts and—

She breathed out hoarsely, a dull wheeze. Her head didn’t hurt, but it felt like it should, she had been full of Alex’s guilt, so loud, so painful. She had killed Astra, _Alex had killed Astra_ , had struck her down when she promised J’onn - _Hank, it had been Hank all along, he was an alien pretending to be a xenophobe_ \- a ‘warrior’s death’. She couldn’t lose another father figure, she wouldn’t be able to—

No. Those weren’t her thoughts. She accessed her power again but kept the bandwidth low, intentionally stifled it so she couldn’t pick up on the thoughts of others. She used it, pushed it into her skull, felt the node throb in sync as she partitioned her thoughts and the ones she had been picking up from others. Generally, a shard would’ve included this during activation in a host, but since the host had never been intended to access the thoughts of others, she had to do it now. It wasn’t hard, a simple tweak, but it brought even more lag between herself and her coreself, a separation that now nearly reached a whole second instead of a quarter of one.

She’d have to fix that later, but at least now she wasn’t... _Alex_ , or at least Alex’s surface thoughts.

But Alex... Alex had _killed_ Astra, and now looking at the partitioned memories, she hated herself for it. She loathed the silence she kept, the way she was letting J’onn take the fall, the way it was pulling her and Kara’s relationship apart. Kara blamed the D.E.O. for it, rightfully so, and it had put a strain on every interaction. She couldn’t consider leaving the D.E.O., no, she felt she was needed there, but Kara? Kara could leave at any point, and Alex wanted to watch over her sister, keep her safe, but didn’t feel like she was _entitled to_ , what with Astra’s death on her hands.

Alex hadn't wanted to kill Astra, hadn’t intended for the fight to result in Astra’s death, but had done so. Again, the differences between Kara and Alex shined bright and painful; Alex would do the thing that promised the best result with the least amount of possible deviations, Kara not so much. Utilitarian, understandable, it was something Addy was deeply familiar with, that exact sort of thought process brought with it a lot of problems but it had never _failed_ them. It had been half the reason why the cycles had become exterminatory to begin with, cutting out the deviations caused by interacting with the existing host species positively. Exploding their planets to fuel the next transit and purging the host species meant they never had the risk of being hunted for who and what they were, what they wanted to achieve in the end.

Astra had died, and Alex was the one who killed her, and Addy knew, painfully, that she wouldn’t be telling Kara that. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, or felt it wasn’t necessary, or anything like that, even with her rudimentary grasp on human cultural norms it was an incredibly bad thing to keep from your sister, adopted or not, but... It would hurt them more coming from her than it would from Alex, and Alex was going to tell her eventually, she could already tell. It was eating away at Alex, gutting her to keep quiet, to keep watching Kara pull more and more away from J’onn, from her, over something like that. If it meant salvaging even just J’onn’s relationship with Kara, she’d eventually tell the truth, to whatever ends that got her.

She would keep the secret, just like she had kept countless other secrets before.

Rolling over, Addy hauled the rest of her body onto her bed, curled her legs in as she quietly pushed back on her power, forcing it back into idle now that she’d properly set up a partitioned space in her node and coreself. She might not tell anyone, but she... she couldn’t keep this to herself, couldn’t _think_. She needed to talk to someone, not to Kara, who would inevitably coax the truth out of her, not to Alex, who would demand to know why or how she knew, but... but someone else. Someone inoffensive, someone non-threatening, someone as awkward as she was and who could offer simple solutions to complicated questions.

Reaching for her computer, she opened up ChatLine, which Kara had sworn was one of the most secure networks to talk to anyone, moused over to Winn’s profile and clicked.

* * *

—QueenAddy [QA] started a conversation with SchottWinn [SW]—

  
SW: Hey, what’s up Addy?  
QA: How do you type so fast?  
SW: Two hands and a lot of practice.  
SW: Actually is that considered offensive?  
SW: Sorry if it is.  
QA: It isn’t.  
SW: That’s good. Uh, still though, what’s up?  
QA: I am having feelings that I am troubled by and was wondering if you knew any methods to handle them.  
SW: Er. Maybe? I’m not exactly the best person to come to when you need coping strategies. What are you feeling?  
QA: Guilt about Astra. I continue to feel as though I could have done more and feel deep shame and discomfort about my disinterest in doing so in the moments leading up to the incident.  
SW: ...Aren’t you human? Because if you are, there’s nothing you can do, they’re not. Also, I know about Astra, but uh, a lot of other people don’t? So don’t go telling anyone else, please.  
QA: Part of me is. And noted, I will keep this to myself.  
SW: Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll have to look into that later, but... uh. Are you asking me to make you a superhero suit?  
QA: Do you think that would help?  
SW: I’m... I mean, it seemed to help everyone else? Have you told Kara about any of this?  
QA: I believe she knows the abstract.  
SW: That’s... great.  
QA: Do you think it will help?  
SW: You don’t have to repeat the message, I already got it. I was just thinking.  
QA: You think very slowly.  
SW: I think perfectly adequately for a human.  
QA: You think slowly.  
SW: Right, not commenting on that. But uh, I mean, I can if you want? Make a suit, I mean, for you. We’d have to talk about it later, but... If you have powers and feel like you need to use them to help others, I’d rather you have some protection or something.  
QA: That’s very considerate of you.  
SW: I mean, it is. I won’t lie, you’re pretty cool, interesting too, but, uh, I’m doing this mostly so Kara won’t murder me if she finds out. Which, I mean, I can’t imagine she would, because it’s Kara and I’m pretty sure Miss Grant has done meaner things to her with no retaliation but with what happened, uh, you know.  
QA: I do not.  
SW: Let’s actually keep it that way, if at all possible.  
---  
  
* * *

“Addy?”

Jerking the top of her laptop shut, Addy swung her head around, catching Kara staring at her with a bemused, casual smile. “It’s dinner,” she explained belatedly. “I ordered us chinese food, have you had it before?”

Taking a moment to process her words, Addy shook her head tentatively. _Taylor_ had chinese takeout before, sure, but she hadn’t, and that had started to become a contextual difference that she was more than willing to focus on.

“Well, c’mon out. You need to eat, and so do I.”

Glancing furtively back at her laptop, Addy finally eased herself off of the bed and onto the floor, plodding her way back out and into the living room. The smell of the food hit her immediately: grease, lots of spices, overcooked beef, altogether it was a surprisingly pleasant combination, even if the thought of what went into it made her want to gag. Kara was already at the table and was hauling a orange-sauce covered ball of unidentifiable meat up and to her mouth, biting into it with a delighted, happy little noise.

Pulling out her own chair, Addy sat herself down and took a piece herself. It was messy, and the sauce made a concerted effort to slide off the batter, but she managed to stop it from doing so by using her fingers to catch the sauce, before depositing it into her mouth.

It was... _okay_. Not bad, not great, she was pretty sure she’d be burning the roof of her mouth if she didn’t have partial invulnerability, but she didn’t mind that much. The batter was a bit overwhelming and unpleasantly chewy when the near-blackened outer bits implied it would be crunchy, though she did like the taste of the chicken beneath everything else. Altogether it, again, wasn’t her favourite food, but much like potstickers, Kara seemed so wholly invested in it that she could deal with it. It was, after all, a lot of calories, and she needed a lot of those now, apparently.

She did wonder what Taylor would think about her being nearly incapable of putting on weight, though.

“Oh!” Kara blurted, mouth still half-full of what appeared to be rice. She jolted back for a second, reaching down to her purse and hauling it up onto the table before pulling the zipper away and reaching inside. “Alex lef’ these for me to hand t’you.”

“Please swallow,” Addy said, before anything else. Kara flushed but thankfully did as asked.

“Sorry,” she said a second later, pulling out another small stack of papers. “But, uh, right! So. Alex took your work back to the D.E.O. to see where you’d fit in after game night, and they decided with your knowledge and my current placement, that you’d do good at CatCo!”

Addy stared blankly at the pile of papers extended towards her. On the very top was what looked like a diploma for a ‘Brookline University’, grading top of her class in computer science. Beneath them was a small packet of what looked like a bunch of instructions and general guidelines, not that she could see much of it. Tentatively, she reached out, plucked the papers from Kara’s hand - which went immediately back to get yet more food - and placed them down right in front of her to free up her own hand. Brushing the top sheet off with her stump, she stared down at the CatCo-watermarked welcome package, included in which was her duties as a ‘junior IT tech’, alongside her salary, apparently minimum wage.

Did Winn know about this? She could’ve sworn she overheard someone talk about how Winn ran IT. Was that why he was so quick to offer superhero-adjacent services? Or was he just... _like that_.

“I’m not sure I can do this job,” she said, not liking how her voice came out faint.

Kara scoffed, but did bother to swallow before speaking this time. “What you showed in those tests was that you have a pre-college understanding of programming and basic server maintenance, among other things. Winn is going to be phoned soon about your situation, since he knows about—well, _me_ , and he’ll get you caught up to speed really quick. He’s a smart guy, you know? A quick thinker.”

Addy glanced up, blinked slowly at Kara, who was clearly trying to reassure her, but couldn’t really find the words to say anything, not with the insistent urge to blurt the truth about Astra sitting in her throat, waiting for the chance to escape. She’d have to go through Taylor’s memories relating to computer sciences again a few times, just to catch herself back up.

“I know this is really soon after you woke up and stuff, and if this doesn’t work out, there are other places for you,” Kara said gently, smiling at her. “This is just the best way to keep you close to me and integrate you into society. That and, really, won’t it be exciting going to work with me? You’ll get to see where I work and how I do things, you’ll even get to meet Miss Grant!”

Another pause.

“...She’s a nice person, by the way, despite initial appearances.”

Addy glanced back down at the pages, flipped to the next one, and understood about half of it.

So, maybe she had made a smart decision to change into new clothes. She wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to sleep tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I did actually steal that chatlog design wholesale from Homestuck. Why? Because I'm lazy and xenoforo is a bastard coding language that only one person I know understands and it is not me. I hope you enjoyed this, nevertheless, this is very much a 'get everything set up and packed away' chapter, and I hope that's okay? I'm still trying to balance Supergirl's themes and atmosphere w/... well, Addy. So, I hope it works?


	7. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy has her first day at work.

“Addy!”

The world returned in sluggish focus, a patch of memory absent. Addy tried to reorient herself, reached out to her coreself, glimpsing metaphorical fingers over the psychic link between her two halves, and got nothing but the smooth reminder that it was mostly inactive, that the only parts available were the linking hub and the still-idling power distribution nexus. She squirmed, stretched out her legs in a languid motion, the dull call of something heavy and weighted urging her to curl further into her pillow.

“Addy! You’re going to be late!”

She understood that humans - and, by extension, herself - dreamed, that it was a product of the brain and how it used the unreasonable amount of time it had to remain idling every day. Sleep had never been exactly nuanced to her, most biological species had some form of downtime, if not necessarily dreams to accompany them, but finding out that sleeping felt _very good_ was a different thing altogether. Even in the half-state she was in, thinking a lot but not quite _thinking_ , somewhere between sleep and awake, she was—

The ground lurched, bucked by some unseen weight pressing down a ways away. Addy cracked her eyes open, feeling the gumminess between her lashes, the short spark of agony that rode her skull as she picked up the fairy lights strung up around her space. Kara sat at the end of her bed, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, glasses riding the bridge of her nose.

“Good morning!” She chirped.

Addy squinted.

Kara beamed an even brighter smile, and Addy had to physically stop her hand from reaching down and pulling the covers over her head. Mornings, she was coming to learn, were unpleasant. “You’ve got about two hours before you’re expected at work,” Kara began, undaunted. “Which means you’ll have plenty of time to do your morning routine without rushing, which _is_ important, because first impressions are—”

She tuned her out, sluggishly reaching out towards the banked memories and knowledge of Taylor’s brain. Morning rituals, morning rituals, ah. There they were, and there were a lot of them, obviously, but she didn’t need all of them, she just needed the gist. Wake up, do basic stretches, eat breakfast, brush teeth, morning indoor workout, take a quick shower - along with other skincare stuff - get properly dressed, prepare required material for daily duties, contact social worker—no, that one could be struck off, so could a fair few others, actually. Taylor had usually given herself about two hours, but Taylor also wasn’t super strong and durable, so she could probably get the workout done far sooner. Add onto that some time inefficiencies - why brush your teeth independently when you could do it in the shower? - and, well. She could do it.

Kara’s finger poking into her shoulder brought her back, the silly smile on Kara’s face having receded back into something more subdued, but still _painfully_ bright. “Addy? You okay?”

She just grunted, reaching up with her hand to palm at the gunk around her eyes.

“I’m gonna check back in on you in thirty minutes,” Kara decided instead, her weight pulling away from the end of her bed. “Please try to stay awake, it’s your big day and everything!”

Addy managed another grunt.

* * *

Stuffing another flavourless brick of condensed calories and, for some reason, oats into her mouth, Addy quickly chased it with some water, ignoring Kara’s knowing look. She still didn’t like drinking anything, the feeling of something liquid, despite Taylor having several memories thereof, in her body, felt... alien in a way that humans didn’t in almost every other capacity. She had never _been_ liquid, she had been crystalline, with specific pathways and methods of transferring required energy - or things to convert into energy - that did not include something so unpleasant as willingly hosting a small body of water in her stomach.

It still beat feeling hard, brittle crumbs stick to her throat, though. That was a sensation she would never like or get used to, she hadn’t even choked or coughed, it had just been _there_ , adhered to her skin like the worst texture on the planet, like there was a lump in her throat. She had kept reaching up expecting to be crying, but turned out it was just that the human mode of consumption was inefficient, but that really shouldn’t’ve been a surprise.

* * *

“Oh! Right!”

Addy glanced up from her obligate one-armed pushup, pausing mid-motion. Kara was glancing behind her, towards the small bookcase where the package including her laptop had originally been, reaching out with a blur to snatch what looked to be an over-the-shoulder bag off of it. “I completely forgot, but this morning, since I was awake _pretty early_ , I uh, might’ve picked this up for you?”

It was, for all intents and purposes, a very normal looking over-the-shoulder bag, though the colouration was delightful. It was made up of four stripes of colour, the top-most being black, the one beneath that being gray, the one beneath that being white, and then finishing at the very bottom of the bag with grape-purple. The strap to the bag was interesting as well, rainbow-patterned from start to finish. It was exactly the sort of thing she would’ve bought, had she seen something like it and had the disposable resources, anyway.

Dropping herself down, Addy used her stump to maneuver herself onto her side, extending her hand out wordlessly. Kara trotted forward, dropping the plastic-covered bag into it, before stepping away.

“It’s a tote bag with a long strap and a compartment inside specifically to hold your laptop—if, uh, you want to bring it along, or something.”

Picking at the plastic with her nail, Addy paused. “Kara?”

The woman in question glimpsed at her, something like nervous tension in her face.

“Why is the packaging in Korean?”

Kara sheepishly laughed, glancing towards one of the windows as she scratched the back of her head with one hand. “Like I said, I was up pretty early, you know? It was no trouble.”

* * *

Taylor had never been particularly invested in make-up, but it had become something of an obligation as she had grown older, as far as Addy could tell. She’d picked up the skill slowly, reluctantly, sure, but what she could dredge from Taylor’s memories gave her at least the context to understand what she was doing.

Tonguing the toothbrush over to the other side of her mouth, Addy angled her head to the side, still-damp hair pulled away from her face, tucked behind her ear, as she drew a narrow line across where lash met lid. It wasn’t that she felt obligated to put make-up on or anything, not like she imagined Taylor had, needing to look presentable and professional to the people who were there to decide the freedoms she got in the later years of her life, but it was part of the morning routine and she’d wanted to at least _try_ , if nothing else.

Blinking a few times, Addy pulled the eyeliner away and observed. It didn’t feel like a lot, which was a bonus since the bulk majority of make-up felt like ants crawling over her skin when she’d tried them out on her arm, but it looked good. Or, at least, _she_ liked it, and Kara had stressed that was what was truly important during their shopping trip.

Stepping away, she smoothed the pad of her thumb over her lips before reaching out to pluck the brush out of her mouth, spitting mint-flavoured foam into the sink. Another blink, the eyeliner remained, and she very quietly found herself liking it.

* * *

“Are you... sure you want to go to work dressed like that?”

Addy glanced at Kara from the reflection in the mirror, before returning to her outfit. She had decided on bold and bright colours today, to signify that she was ready to do work and get into the thick of things. She’d gone for cherry-red in terms of shirt, bright and impossible to ignore, contrasting the canary-yellow of her pants, though the red was reinforced with her shoes, which bore a near-identical colour. The laces on her shoes, to be fair, diverged heavily, from the red of the shoe to an acidic green, not to mention that she’d be covering the top half of her ensemble with that pale-blue sweater. It’d be a lot of colours, but today felt like _a lot of colours_ type of day.

“I like it,” Addy informed her, because she felt that Kara might not get that. Kara’s face, just visible beyond her shoulder, reflected in the mirror, fell a bit before tightening, something firm slipping into it as she nodded.

“That’s totally okay, I was just... concerned, sorry,” Kara started, the onset of a ramble as obvious as a building landslide. “Miss Grant can just be a little... _crude_ about what other people wear, but don’t let that dishearten you, okay? You can own this look, it’s very you.”

Addy watched her own face brighten involuntarily at the praise, lips tugged up into a loose smile. “I think so too,” she reaffirmed.

* * *

The menu at Noonan's was overwhelmingly dense. Kara maneuvered the space like she’d lived there, and from what she’d told Addy about when it came to what she’d done before being hired by Miss Grant, she almost _did_. Noonan’s had been her first real job, apparently, that she’d taken after leaving university, albeit a part-time one, and _everyone_ knew her here, even people who had to be introduced to Kara in the first place.

Glancing between the options on the menu hanging behind the register, Addy canted her head to the side. Sticky buns, bagels, muffins, coffee, every pastry she could remember from Taylor’s memories, breakfast sandwiches, lunch sandwiches, fancy versions of coffee where they try to pretend it’s not coffee by overwhelming it with other additives. It had, as far as she could tell, almost _everything_.

But one thing kept drawing her eye. Boba tea had been one of Taylor’s fixations in the later few months before Gold Morning, and not in a good way. Because she didn’t have her thoughts, she could only make assumptions, but Taylor had gotten annoyed and frustrated around it, largely because she’d been so focused on the end-of-the-world prep and here the world was, going nuts over whether or not famous people liked this new type of absurd tea. It had only really gained any amount of recognition in those months leading up to the end, it had probably felt to her like a waste, like another distraction that the unaware masses were using to pretend that the constant Endbringer fights weren’t steadily wearing down society to its foundations, like the world wasn’t going to end for more blatant reasons than The Warrior.

The thing was, Taylor had never _tried_ it. She didn’t know what it smelled like, what it tasted like, nothing. She hadn’t had a lot of agency, even near the end, which had primarily been a result of how she’d lived. Taylor had been a teenage warlord being rehabilitated through a program meant for child superheroes, what free time she did have was spent on-base or on-call with her father, she had no real ability to do things on her own, to explore them, without an explanation why. Years into her career as a hero and scrutiny still chased her heels, for what could probably be argued as a pretty good reason, but nevertheless, it had... restricted her.

She had never gotten a chance to see or engage with anything that wasn’t framed through the lens of her duty, her future, what she needed to do to ensure people survived.

Glancing back towards Kara, who was busily demolishing a messy-looking cinnamon roll while chatting with the person on register, Addy felt her fingers twitch at her side, venting a bit of her indecision. No, Taylor might be gone, but it didn’t mean she couldn’t live out the things she was denied for her, even if selfishly.

“Could I have some of that bubble tea?”

* * *

Tapioca was a wonderful invention. They didn’t taste like much, but they almost gelled when she ground them between her teeth, still slightly sticky from the sugar-rich drink they had been drenched in. The combination of the two, the stickiness, the way they fell apart between her teeth, made her itch to bite something, to grind her teeth, though she knew better than to give in to the impulse. It really was the texture carrying the drink, as, not for the first time, she was struck by the fact that she had very different tastes to Taylor. Tea was fine, it came in a wide variety of flavours, but it wasn’t so... important to her, or a big part of her likes, as it had been with Taylor, who had almost obsessively collected and drank it.

“Okay, so, you might be nervous—” Kara started, her voice wobbly.

Glancing away from the elevator doors, Addy stared at her. “I’m not.” Which was true, nervousness was reserved for the earlier hours, when she’d spent all that time peeling the hair from her body - apparently, her durability didn’t extend to her hair, body or head, which was a little concerning - in the tub, with all the time in the world to think about what-ifs or possible problems with nothing else better to do. Despite the oxymoronic nature of the idea, it was apparently very possible to _overthink_ things as a human, which was difficult to get used to. There had been no such thing as too much thinking, she still wasn’t really sure there was, but she would go with common wisdom if only to avoid another spiral of anxiety in the tub.

Kara stared back for a moment, unaware of her inner dialogue and the true intricacies of the topic. “Right. Well, _I’m_ nervous,” she said finally, glancing away. “It’ll be fine, though, one way or another, things will absolutely work out—”

The elevator shuddered to a stop and then dinged, the doors peeling apart.

Her first impression of CatCo was that it looked a _lot_ like the rest of the building. It was sleek, with glass fixtures and very, _very_ white. Which, really, she would never understand the human fixation with the colour white, because it was genuinely the blandest combination of visible light on the planet and the only thing that was really saving the floor from looking like a hospital break room was the array of cubicles, each one personalized, and the constant smattering of framed magazine covers, blown up to huge sizes to act as posters.

“Kara!” Winn’s voice caught her attention, dragging her away from the maze-like throng of white-on-white. He hurried towards them, Kara stepping out of the elevator and Addy belated remembering to follow her, faux-gold doors sliding shut behind them. Even this early in the morning - barely seven - people were already there, most wearing some combination of semi-formal wear, including Winn, who was wearing another oddly-patterned cardigan over a white dress shirt.

Speaking of Winn, he turned to her the second he caught sight of them. His eyes went from hers, to her clothes, trailing down almost agonizingly slowly, stopping at her shoes, green laces tucked into the sides so they wouldn’t flop around or trip her up.

“You’re wearing _th—_ ”

Kara slapped a hand over his mouth with one hand, still clutching Miss Grant’s latte in the other hand. “He thinks your outfit is _very nice_ , don’t you Winn?”

Winn met Kara’s eyes for a moment before nodding a bit like a bobblehead, Kara’s hand easing itself off of his face as they both turned back towards her. “Right!” He blurted, eyes flicking around in panic as he visibly tried to regather himself, not that she understood particularly why he was getting so flustered about it. “Right—yes, it’s very fitting. For you, I mean!”

Blinking slowly, she canted her head to the side. “Kara said the same thing.”

The two in question shared another quick look, Kara’s throat tightening as she made an aborted gesture with her free hand, left near her hips, which Winn apparently picked up on if the way he jerked his head again in a jolted nod was any indication. What exactly they were discussing, well, Addy had no clue, but then she didn’t really need to. She could always just tap one of them for the knowledge if the topic came up again, but she was pretty comfortable not knowing.

“Sh— _oot_ , she’s on her way up. Cover for me?” Kara blurted, reaching for her glasses with one hand while Winn awkwardly proceeded to spread his stance out, shoulders wide, legs apart, hands at his side, using what little - because, he was shorter than her, for better or for worse - bulk he had to almost cover Kara.

Speaking of Kara, with her glasses pulled down near her nose, she very quickly unloaded a blast of concentrated heat and energy _from her eyes_ into the latte, reheating it near-instantly. It was, in Addy’s opinion, possibly the most wasteful thing Kara had used her power for yet, and she had a very distinct memory of watching her float from the couch to the fridge this morning to get some yogurt.

As quick as it happened, it was over, her glasses settled back on the bridge of her nose, latte prepared and held out in a wordless greeting, looking no different despite the superhuman acts. Barely a second later, a second elevator opened, and Cat Grant walked in.

Addy had to tilt her head down to look at her, even with the distance between herself and the woman in question, who was wearing heels. She understood that most women weren’t nearly six-foot—Kara wasn’t, that much was for sure, and neither was Alex, but Cat Grant had to be at the most five-foot-three, with two inches added by virtue of her heels. She was blonde, but not like Kara, whose hair was honeyed and warm, transitioning into something closer to wheat-yellow near the tips, and rather a darker, more rich blonde, the honeycomb to Kara’s honey. She walked like she owned the world, startlingly similar to how Taylor did with the awareness her bugs provided, not a single glimpse in any one direction, just a careless strut that made other people move out of her way, graceful despite it all.

Coming to a halt, Cat wordlessly held out one hand, to which Kara quickly handed over the latte. Bringing it up to her mouth, the woman took a long drink, her other hand coming up, raising a single finger, as she looked to drain about half of it. Her sunglasses, large and round, hid her expression, but something about how her shoulders tensed up made Addy think she probably wasn’t in the best of moods.

Breaking the seal between her lips and the edge of the cup, Cat let her glasses slide down the bridge of her nose, brown eyes turned towards her. “I woke up this morning to the fact that my ex-husband is spreading lies about me in tabloids,” she began, her voice flat and sharp. “I then had to substitute my driver since his daughter had her gallbladder try to explode like a potato in a microwave the night before, and the driver who did pick me up was eight minutes late and drove like he was trying to kill pedestrians. When I _finally_ arrive at my job, I find _this_ , the hobbit and you, Keira, not doing your _jobs_ , waiting for me to come and give you entertainment.”

There was a short pause, Winn audibly swallowing just to her right.

“Speaking of entertainment, Keira, tell me, did you order a clown to come in today?”

Kara’s spine jolted, straightened out as she folded her hands together in front of her. “I—no? Should I have, did Carter want one or—”

Cat reached up to push her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, something like a sneer stretching across her face as she raised her free hand to point at Addy. “Then tell me, Keira, _why is this woman dressed like one?_ ”

Glancing down at herself, she couldn’t help the odd feeling of hurt. She liked colours, they looked good on her, she felt it worked as an ensemble and she was proud of them—

“Actually, Miss Grant, that’s uhm, your new junior IT tech,” Kara began slowly, motioning with her hands. “This is Addy Queen, you hired her to work under Winn, remember?”

Head turning fully towards her, Cat took another sip of her latte. “Alright, _Abby_ , why are you wearing... _that_.”

“It’s Addy.” She said, instead, because it was _her_ name and it was important that it was said right. She chose it, it was hers, and nobody could take that from her.

She could more feel than see both Winn and Kara go still and stiff beside her. Cat, meanwhile, tilted her head, lips pursed, her index finger tapping against her cup.

“ _Addy_ ,” Cat said at last, the word filled to bursting with something like amusement. “Why are you wearing what you’re wearing?”

She didn’t really feel like she should be obligated to explain it, but she did look out of place. She didn’t look sloppy or anything, it wasn’t like the pattern on her shirt made her look like she just rolled out of bed, but she did understand she stuck out, not that she minded the latter that much. “Because I like the colours,” she explained, instead, because it was simple and easy and while she got that people didn’t get her reasonings all the time, _she_ did, and she felt that it was more important that she got them across than to not try at all.

There was another pause, Cat tilting her head back and forth, an easy rock of curiosity before, after another belated sip of her latte, she nodded. “That’s acceptable,” she said over the sound of Winn quiet spluttering. “Don’t come into work wearing something _lurid_ , but feel free to keep dressing as you’d like.” She turned on heel, tap-tapping her way towards what, at a second glance, was rather obviously her office.

“How— _what_ , she doesn’t call any—” Winn started, stopped, and started again, words jumbled as he clearly went through a crisis. Reaching over, Addy took the single step to close the distance and gently smoothed her hand across his head, glancing down at him. He glanced back up at her in something like muted, bewildered shock, but didn’t reject the soothing, which meant it was probably helping.

“KEIRA!” Cat bellowed from her office, jerking Kara out of her stupor just a few paces away. Kara shot them both a broad, wide smile, all white teeth and bright feelings, her hands coming up at her front to gesture at the two of them with a pair of upturned thumbs, before she rushed off.

Addy watched her go, watched as Kara’s face lit up brightly, regardless of Cat using the wrong name or the two or three verbal jabs about the colour of her sweater the woman somehow managed to fit into the few seconds it took Kara to pace into Cat’s office and shut the door behind her. She clearly didn’t mind that as much as Addy did, maybe she was just used to the torrent of disdain she received from Cat, maybe she liked it. She had heard people were like that, not that she was particularly interested in the topic.

Humans were still something she was going to have to work to figure out, though at least she was pretty sure Kara was faring no better than she was on the topic.

“You uh—you can stop that now,” Winn said belatedly, reaching up to gently try to stop her hand, not quite managing it anyway. He was a short man, built with the features that would’ve made him physically intimidating had he not ceased growing at around five-six, with a broad chin and jaw, a layer of stubble, and big hands. Really, he was a bit different like that, but then so was Addy, so she could relate to not quite fitting perfectly into the boundaries of one’s physical form.

Pulling her hand away, she let it drop and come to rest at her side. Winn smiled at her, a weak and somewhat strained thing, but a smile nonetheless. She tried for her own, much like she had when they’d first been introduced over board games, and the way his smile warmed was worth the awkwardness of trying to copy an expression she didn’t make naturally all that often. She still _felt_ happiness, she liked the feeling of it, she wasn’t some apathetic robotic matrix of goals and calculations, not anymore. She liked the way happiness warmed her chest and made her want to do more things, see more places, touch and fiddle her hand at her sides, but she also knew that she was very bad at expressing that. She’d have to work on it, if she wanted to get social graces down pat, in any event.

“Right, so uh,” Winn began again, motioning towards what she assumed was his desk, if the litany of dolls outfitted in Superman’s costume was any indication. “I’m your boss for the time being? Like, we don’t expect a whole lot out of you, you are the entry position to end all entry positions, and all that, but if Cat asks you to do anything, ask me about it if you don’t know, and then do it. I might be your authority, but she’s _my_ authority.”

Coming to a halt next to his desk, Addy watched as Winn settled himself down into his chair with a grunt. Glancing up at her, then back at his desk, he quickly motioned towards the desk directly across from him, one which had been cleaned off at some point.

“It’s yours, that’s, uh, where you’ll be sitting and stuff,” he continued. Addy glanced it over, she’d definitely need to find some things to decorate it with, it was bland white and the space she was going to be working in had enough white, thank-you-very-much, but it wasn’t like she had photos or collectables to show off or anything. Maybe Kara would have some ideas?

“Er, you, uh, want to sit down?” Winn interrupted, again.

Addy blinked. That was fair, she hadn’t really moved since they’d been introduced, there was just so much going on, so much _different._ CatCo was loud, a constant low thrum of chatter from both people and technology. Computers squeaked, people murmured, people discussed and most of it was unrelated. She didn’t like it, but then she could tune it out if she could get just used to it, it was just... _there_. She’d have to deal with it.

Walking over towards her new desk, Addy set her bag down to the side of her monitor and lowered herself down in the seat, stretching her legs out until they unceremoniously bumped against Winn’s, who jolted and glanced up at her, smiling weakly.

“KEIRA!” Cat bellowed for the second time in what felt like as many minutes, Addy catching Kara jolt up from her own desk and nearly begin sprinting towards the office again. “Mike Enzi apparently decided I would enjoy the sight of his wrinkly—”

The door shut, and she could just about hear the entire office sigh in relief before returning to that low murmur of conversation.

“You’ll get used to it,” Winn interjected, his voice sounding a bit more firm, less awkward and nervous. “It took me a while too, this place is really busy, conversation is basically constant, as you’d imagine for something like a multimedia company, but you learn to handle it pretty quickly.”

Addy swallowed, reaching up to scratch at the side of her neck. She hoped so, honestly, because this was a lot, it was a lot of different things that she hadn’t had to get used to. IKEA wasn’t even that bad and half of the store had been determined to help Kara pick out beds. Instead of vocalizing any of that, of talking about her discomfort, because it wasn’t like saying any of that would fix anything, she tried for another shaky smile.

Winn smiled back, just as strained.

“So, onto your actual job. What do you know about ruby?”

“It’s a precious gem?”

“Not in this context it isn’t, but some people sure do treat it like it’s one.”

* * *

Leaning back in her chair, Addy stared at the piece of paper Winn had pinched between his fingers. On it was a really simple flow chart, with ‘HTTP status decisions’ written in huge blocky text above it. It started, simply, with ‘did it work?’, with two arrows, one with ‘yes’ written next to it, and one with ‘no’ written next to it. The ‘yes’ led to another blurb, which said ‘just use 200, literally nobody cares’, and the ‘no’ arrow led to ‘whose fault was it?’, with two more arrows, one with ‘yours’ written next to it, which led to a blurb with ‘400’ written in it, and an ‘ours’, which led to a blurb with ‘500’ in it.

“You have to remember this, okay?” Winn continued off from where he’d paused his rant. “People seem to act like HTTP status is this huge thing and it needs to be complicated and have like, layers within layers to figure out things, but no. This is literally just it, they’re all wrong. I am right.”

She got the impression this had been something he had argued about before, but didn’t comment.

* * *

“Right, so, while each computer and log-in details are kept independent and under some degree of secrecy from us, but after one of Miss Grant’s board members was implicated in a hacking scheme, they uh, loosened the exact specifics of the secrecy involved.”

Addy stared vacantly at the list of pornography across her screen. There had to be at least a hundred gigabytes of it.

“Which is why purging computers of, well, _this_ became my job, because Miss Grant wanted me to make sure nobody was doing anything illegal, especially illegal acts which hurt her, and, er. Well. Now it’s your job!”

She turned to look at him, but Winn very quickly ducked behind the screen of his computer, waving at her from over it. “Do that and do some more studying, okay? I gotta make sure whatever moron downloaded thirty gigabytes of virus-littered Avengers movies doesn’t end up nearly bricking us. Which it won’t, because this is a job I’m actually good at, but uh, the virus is sure making an effort, let me tell you that much.”

* * *

Being tired was a novelty she did not want to particularly get used to. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been _sleepy_ before, or exhausted, but this? Tiredness was somehow different. She hadn’t wanted to try to use her power to get a leg up, not with so many people nearby. The risk of picking up everyone’s thoughts was an increasingly unpalatable idea after marking down everyone who downloaded explicit videos onto their work computers, which had already given her too much insight into the sex lives of her coworkers.

Her body, as it happened, was _physically_ up for the task, but maybe not mentally. She was tired, but in an achy, awkward way that made her feel like someone had replaced her brain with marshmallow fluff. She was also really hungry, like stomach-churningly, achingly hungry, the type of hungry you only notice when it’s grown to consume basically every thought in your head.

Winn was still at his desk, and Kara was apparently still handling Cat’s problems, but she? She was free to go home whenever she wanted to. She had her own keys, she knew approximately where the building was, what floor they lived on, and if all else failed Kara, during lunch break, had forced a few bills into her hand and told her to call a taxi if she got lost.

Glancing out the window next to her desk, Addy felt the odd urge to wince when she saw it was already dark out.

Pushing the remainder of the ‘extra studying’ Winn had given her after he’d helped figure out where she was in terms of things she would need to learn to do her job - _“There’s not a whole lot, but it is something, so please read up on this? I can help, you have my online handles and whatever.”_ \- but something else was on her mind, something she needed to ask.

“Winn?”

He glanced up at her from his computer, blinking sleepily at her. “Yeah?”

She leaned a bit forward, tried to lower her voice. “What about the suit?”

For a moment, he squinted at her, looking bewildered, before it seemed to click. “The _suit_ —oh the _suit_ , oh, I uh, thought you had given the idea up, since you didn’t bring it up or anything.”

“I didn’t,” she replied, because he did say it would help the guilt, and it wasn’t like she couldn’t live with the guilt, she just didn’t really _want_ to.

Flicking his eyes back and forth, apparently to check for anyone nearby, Winn quickly jolted down, grabbed his bag, and pulled out a scrap of scribble-covered printer paper from the interior, quickly handing it over to her.

Unfolding the crinkly mess and ignoring Winn’s probing stare, she smoothed the page out in front of her. There were a few sketches, surprisingly well-constructed ones that followed her body-type. They were all simple in composition, a lot of black coats over pants and with big boots and gauntlets, but also a lot of bodysuits as well, more generic than anything else. Still, one out of the lot caught her eye more than anything. It wasn’t much, it hadn’t even been roughly scribbled in like the rest, but it looked a lot better. The suit itself was basic, looking more like a rough sketch of body armour, sectioned off into pieces. There was the chest piece, looking almost like a bulletproof vest, padded gloves that extended up to her elbow, where they presumably connected to an undershirt of some kind. Beneath that was a pair of baggy-looking reinforced pants, bunched up near her knees to allow for the calf-length combat boots to fit. If that was just it, it’d be just as bland as the rest, but for reasons she wasn’t totally clear about, the fact that it had this matador-esque half-cape that extended down over where her missing arm would be, down to about her hips, covering only that half, was really appealing.

“That one was one I did just before you arrived,” Winn murmured, Addy flicking her eyes up to catch him hovering a bit over her, supporting himself by planting both hands on his desk as he leaned over. “What is it with capes and your superhumans?”

Addy glanced back down, smoothed her thumb over it. “It’d have to be more colourful,” she said firmly, scraping her nail over it. “That and maybe tone down the combat look a bit, I already know what I want to be called.”

“Wait, you do?”

She looked up at him, tried not to let her face settle into the ‘are you a moron’ expression it very much wanted to. “Why would I ask for a suit without a name?”

“Kara didn’t start with one,” he pointed out stubbornly.

Addy shrugged. “I’m not Kara.”

There was another beat of silence.

“I’m going to call myself Administrator,” she said finally, the words feeling odd on her tongue, not forced, but reluctant to give. She had chosen the name because it was a connection to her past, to Taylor’s past, to who she was, but it wasn’t so dramatic that it would give the game away.

“That’s a bit... ominous.”

She shrugged. “Taylor dealt with ominous, and her name was even worse. I’m going by Administrator.”

Winn backed off at that, flopping down into his desk chair, both hands raised with palms facing forward. “Alright, alright. Though, actually, what was Taylor’s name?”

“Skitter was the one she was mainly known for, though she went by both Weaver and Khepri later on in life.” The words were chalky, unpleasant, she both wanted to talk about Taylor and didn’t. She’d done it easily before, explained at length about Taylor’s life to Hank - J’onn - when he’d pressed, and it hadn’t felt so close to painful then. Now, though, she couldn’t say the same.

“Yeah, that first one is, uh, _pretty bad_. I’m assuming a bug theme, ‘cos uh, Khepri and Skitter and all?”

Still, though, the words came, like she needed to say them. “Mh. I gave her bug control, or well, really, it was more than she spread her consciousness across bugs. They were extensions of her, she could see through them, feel through them, even sense them like you just _know_ where your arm is.”

Winn faltered a bit at that, before his face picked back up. “Well, bug control isn’t so bad, really.”

She was honestly in agreement with that. Really, humans downplayed the sheer importance of bugs, the diversity, the fact that they were everywhere. She could’ve, with minor changes to the connection event those years ago, given Taylor something like rat control, but even despite the larger bodies, it would’ve been magnitudes weaker. “It helped that her range was several blocks wide, and she lived in a warm, temperate part of the east coast.”

Winn outright froze at that, his eyes going a bit hazy. “That’s...” he finally started, throat bobbing. “Biblical. And closer to what I was expecting.”

“It’s an interesting configuration of my powers, for sure. Probably the strongest it can be, in terms of overall versatility and subtlety, for this planet. You don’t have a lot of colony organisms or swarm species that are easily weaponized.” Then again, most ‘control this type of creature’ powers would be just as powerful and versatile if it was all so vague. She’d given Taylor control over the cultural concept of ‘bugs’ with some blurry lines to account for lobster and crab. Bugs weren’t just a single uniform group, though, and the fact of the matter was that she’d been stacking to deck to begin with. It’d be like giving someone control over everything in the ‘Caniformia’ family, which, despite its deceptive name, did not solely include dogs, but rather bears, foxes, raccoons, seals, walruses, and plenty others.

Taylor had been her favourite host, even before they’d initially connected. Watching her interact with the world had been enough to decide to see how far she could go with her, and... here she was, years later, still not entirely sure if that was the right decision.

“Wait, _configuration?_ ” Winn hissed, which was a surprise, since she’d not been paying attention and now he was rather close to her. “You could do that too?”

“Obviously?” She was really confused about why people seemed to consistently underestimate her. Was it the missing arm? “I have broad-spectrum psychic control over living things with various ranges and degrees of influence as the baseline configuration. Anything within that, so long as I adjust properly, is under my control.”

“...Like people?” Winn probed weakly.

Again, he was being very stupid. “Of course people, you’re not _special_. You’re animals, just like the rest of them.”

Winn slumped back down into his seat, breathing out a strained wheeze. “That’s... _great_ to know.”

She thought so too.

Patting her bag, just to double-check that the laptop was in there, despite remembering putting it in there herself, Addy finally pulled herself up from her chair, wobbling a bit as she came to a full stand. Unlike Winn, she had not been gifted with a chair with wheels on it, which was a shame, she rather liked the idea of a mobile chair, that and the ability to spin around in it would be nice.

Those were ideas for later, though.

Spotting her out of the corner of her eye, down near the photocopier, Addy picked up her pace and made a line for Kara. “Hello.”

Kara jolted, nearly slamming her head against the wall, swinging her entire body around. They met eyes for a brief moment before Kara slumped, a huff leaving her lips in what sounded like relief. “Addy, you scared me. Sorry, I’m... a bit on edge, because of things lately.”

“It’s okay,” she was quick to interject, because it was. Kara looked pretty frazzled and tired, she couldn’t blame her for that.

Kara smiled, though it was as weak as the ones Winn had been sending her way. She started grabbing at the papers the photocopier had produced, piling them onto her hand. “So, I uh, can’t come home with you, today. Normally I’d be getting off at this time, but, well.” She paused, glancing around for a moment, before leaning in, lowering her voice. “Alex called, I have an idea of who a villain is attacking. I haven’t actually told you about that? And I will, when we capture him, which I will do, but I’m really sorry Addy, can you get home on your own?”

Addy shot another look out the window. In the short time she’d been talking to Winn, the sun had set even further, going from dark, syrupy orange to something gloomier, cold blues filling in where the sun was now absent. It felt foreboding, oddly, despite knowing rationally nothing could hurt her, or if something tried, she could very easily stop them, but... It just felt uncomfortable, uneasy.

Shrugging, she didn’t turn her gaze away from the streetlamp-illuminated city below. “I’ll be fine.”

Kara let out a deep, rattling sigh of relief. “Thank you so much Addy, today’s been hectic and Miss Grant is in a really foul mood after that incident with Senator Enzi and just... thank you. Be safe, alright? I’ll see you at home.”

Addy managed to turn her head away from the window, but by the time she had, Kara was already trotting off towards Cat, who was in her office staring at her computer like it might start attacking her at any moment.

* * *

The coffee was warm in her hand, despite the ‘warning: hot’ stamped onto the side of the cup. She wasn’t even really sure _why_ she bought it, outside of maybe something to do. Noonan’s had been on the way home and everyone around her was always so obsessed with coffee despite it tasting like bitter dirt and so she’d handed over a few dollars to get her own. She hadn’t even tried to drink it yet, just basked in the scent and kept her pace steady.

Generally, nighttime came with a decrease in population, though some people operated nocturnally more often than they didn’t. National City, then, felt more like an extension of what she remembered of Taylor’s experiences in New York. People were still plenty common, walking down the streets, none looking particularly shady, just people who need to go somewhere at this time of the night in the middle of February. In Brockton, at least, the cold would keep people indoors, as regardless of how temperate it was in comparison to other Atlantic locations, it still got really cold at this time of the year and night, but seeing as it was still warm enough to go without a jacket, that obviously wasn’t a problem here.

The street leading towards Kara’s apartment was emptier than the bustling ones closer to CatCo, though. It wasn’t totally abandoned, mostly because people were out on balconies, enjoying the weather, but she wasn’t weaving in and out of the way of other pedestrians. Cars were frequent, but quick to pass, leaving lengths of time between that felt too quiet, too isolated, for her own good comfort.

Coming to a stop at the crosswalk, Addy turned her head to the side and stared down the length of an alley. It was, much like everything else, dark, gloomy in a way that soaked into the area around it. Having a concept of brightness - instead of the more typical total awareness of light levels via secondary systems found in herself and her kin - was new, but not technically _bad_. You lost a lot of depth when you ‘saw’ - for lack of a better term, since sight was certainly not identical between her coreself and her body - everything in perfect detail and with no light to it. Things became more... textured with light, given the depth that it somehow lacked otherwise.

Turning away from the alley, Addy ticked her eyes up, caught sight of the green walking person symbol - she really had to find out what it was called - and made her way across one of the few remaining crosswalks before she’d get home. She could even see the apartment, standing at-odds with the suburbia around it, dozens of windows lit-up.

“Kick rocks dude, I’m not interested.”

Pausing mid-step, Addy regretfully pried her eyes from the apartment and around the corner of the building she had been walking past. There, a woman with off-red hair stood, arms folded against her chest, chin upturned, eyes narrowed, while a man a good foot and a half taller than her towered over, bulky arms splayed out so that one curled around one side of her, caging her in.

“Don’t be like that, we got along _great_ ,” he replied, voice tense.

The woman rolled her eyes, catching sight of Addy as she did. “I was on the clock, I _had_ to be nice to you.”

The man didn’t follow her gaze, remaining firmly pointed down. “We had chemistry,” he tried again, this time with a little less patience in his voice. “I can treat you well, you know that?”

Addy glanced down at her coffee, felt the heat between her fingers. She took another step forward.

“Seriously dude, I said _no_ , leave me alone and stop fucking _following me_.”

A grunt, low and angry. “I’m trying to be _nice_ , you bitch.”

Her coffee swished around in the cup. Another step.

“No, we both know what you’re _trying_ to do.”

“Fuck you, you don’t get to talk to me like—”

The cup left her fingers before she could really figure out she was doing it. She watched, almost uncomprehending, as the paper cup rolled through the air and with it the brown slurry of bitter shit she had been trying to convince herself to drink fell out and free into the air. The man barely turned in time before the entire steaming contents of the cup drowned itself across his shirt, and more specifically, coated everything past his waistline.

The man yelped like a kicked dog, jerking back and stumbling, one hand reaching towards his pants while the other tried desperately to pluck the shirt from his skin. “Fuck!” He hissed, stumbling back another step. “Fuck this, I was just, no. Fuck this, fuck both of you. I’m fucking out, crazy bitch.”

And then he was gone. Just like that, running down the sidewalk.

Addy remembered to blink, reaching up to rub at her cheek. She wasn’t really sure why she’d done that. ‘Because Taylor would’ve’ seemed like a reasonable answer, but it didn’t... really work. She hadn’t been thinking about Taylor at the time, she’d been mostly caught in her own head, she’d felt out of place and—

There was a glimpse of _something_ reaching out to her, like psychic fingers. Instinctively, she swat them away, shoving back with her own force. The woman jolted, just about flinched away from her, though stopped herself by grabbing onto the wall, now looking at her with wide, bewildered eyes.

“Did you do that?” Addy asked, mostly out of curiosity.

The woman swallowed, her throat bobbing. “Sorry, you’re just... you’re a very powerful psychic presence, it’s very... soothing. I was going to just check if you were safe, because that guy, y’know, I didn’t, because he was supposed to be a decent person and—” The woman petered off, settling into an awkward, nervous silence. “Sorry, my uh, you’re an alien, right?”

People weren’t supposed to know that. “No.”

The woman smiled weakly, almost shakily. “It’s okay, I’m one too. I’m a Titanian, I work at the dive bar—well, and uh. Thank you.”

Oddly, Addy didn’t really feel like she deserved it. Not because she did something wrong, or did nothing at all, but rather because she didn’t really feel like _she_ did it. There had been no purpose behind the action, it had been sudden, an impulse that she hadn’t been able to overcome, a bit like grinding her teeth. “It’s okay.”

“No, I seriously owe you,” the woman interrupted, despite really, really not owing her anything. She reached into her pocket after a moment, plucking a receipt out and tearing off the top half. She jammed the paper forward, and Addy, without much else to do, took it in her free hand. Unclenching her fingers, she let the paper unroll, an address at the very top printed in black ink.

“That’s the address to the bar, uh. It’s called Al’s Dive Bar, okay? You knock on the door and the password is Dollywood. Ask for Carol - that’s me - at any point if you need, I don’t know, a favour, information, other places where aliens congregate. Something, okay? Seriously, you just stopped me from possibly having to out my species to a dickbag, that’s... big. So, please?”

Addy let her fingers curl back around the scrap and slowly tucked it into the pocket of her sweater. Carol - if she wasn’t lying - smiled weakly at her, fidgeting in place.

“I can’t give you a fiver to replace your coffee, but uh, y’know. If you ever come by, I’ll give you a free drink?”

She wasn’t even sure if this body was capable of getting drunk, actually, but nodded anyway, mostly to move the conversation along.

Carol blinked, smiled brightly. “That’s great! Thank you, seriously, just—so much. You have no idea. I can finally start heading home now that he’s not following me, and just, thank you.”

Then, much like the man who had been accosting her, she was gone, almost jogging back down the road and then turning off around the side of a building.

Addy glanced away, towards the now-empty cup absolutely reeking of coffee. It had, at some point, rolled down towards her, and she nudged it gently with the toe of her shoe, kicking it back up the street. Following it, she turned back towards her apartment, towards home, and then back again, to the cup.

Taking another step, she crushed it beneath her heel, and tried, for the first time, to not think about what she just did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a bit more character interaction in this one (and hopefully fewer blunders, I am still dealing with a bit of a weird head fever thing that refuses to go away) but still with more set-up because I intend to really derail canon relatively soon, kinda.
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


	8. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy does some heroics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depiction of a panic attack in some detail.

This was starting to become a pattern.

Doing her darndest to blink the sleep from her eyes, Addy felt the world gradually, drip-by-drip, return to her. She did not want to be awake, she in fact had gone to bed because Kara hadn’t returned home and staying up any later was going to be—

_BANG. BANG. BANG._

Right. The reason she was awake. The banging, the loud, heavy-fisted jostling of the front door. Ensuring her blanket remained wrapped around her first, Addy coaxed her legs off to the side of the bed and eased herself up and off with only a bit of a stumble. The world spun for a moment, her body naturally displeased with her decision to wake up despite—

_BANGBANG. BANGBANG. BANGBANG._

— _that_.

Reaching up with her hand to clumsily wipe the gunk away from her eyes, blanket pinched in place between her forearm and bicep, she trudged her way out of her room, trying to stifle the yawn building in her chest. She hadn’t remembered what she had dreamed, which was odd, as other humans had spoken of remembering the dreams _they_ had. Some had even gone so far as to gain some degree of conscious control and awareness over their dream-state, it had all been fascinating, part of a larger body of scientific work she’d been looking into during breaks and when she had nothing else to do—

 _BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG_ —

Arriving at the door, Addy eased the deadbolt out of place, twisted the door lock, and yanked the thing open. Her head was splitting, she could hardly see beyond the fogginess in her eyes from the tears, her brain was not being very responsive despite having more than enough time to fully wake up, and Alex was standing in the hallway, looking haggard.

Addy blinked slowly, tried not to let her eyes drift entirely shut. The blanket was warm, it smelled like Kara and rose oil and...

“Kara’s been taken.”

The world lurched again. Her eyes snapped open, staring at Alex. She tried to process the words, tried to see how what she said could be _wrong_ , because Kara was incredibly strong, possibly _the_ strongest on the planet and she was just—just _taken_? “By who?” She had to know. Kara had to come back, Kara was _important_ and she only had very few other important entities before this point and _she had been responsible for the deaths of both of them_.

Alex reached out, steadying herself against the doorframe. “Can you let me in, first? This is... sensitive, and I’m pretty sure I woke half of the floor up.”

Shuffling to the side, Addy gave her the space to enter before reaching out to shut the door behind her. She watched Alex stalk a small distance away, off towards the dining room table. Finally, reaching the chairs, she lifted one up, pulled it back, and eased herself into it with a sigh of audible relief. Turning her head back towards her, Alex stared at her. “Are you coming over here or not?”

Rucking the blanket up closer to her chin, but not bothering to hide the quickness in her step, after all this was _very important_ , Addy marched over to the table, used her foot to kick the chair back out, and then eased herself into it across from Alex. An Alex who looked... twisted, torn, broken up. Her face had lines set into it, she looked ten years older somehow, though that could have something to do with the sweat slicking her hair to her forehead. “She hasn’t told you anything about the alien we’ve been tracking, has she?”

Addy shook her head sharply. “Only that they were looking for someone and it had been stressing her out.”

She watched Alex’s throat bob, a slow and unsteady swallow. The woman stared at her for a moment, hands coming up to fold together in front of her, an attempt to compose herself, as far as Addy could tell. “There had been someone going around executing aliens,” she started, fingers visibly flexing against one-another. “We figured out, mostly through the process of elimination, that someone was executing Fort Rozz escapees, and through that, we figured out that it was one of the jailers who was doing it.”

She had to think, she _had to think_. Kara was in trouble, possibly about to be executed, Alex was here instead of banging down the person’s door because—because _what?_ Was it already too late? She didn’t know, she had to know, _she had to know_ —

“She’s not in danger.”

Addy froze.

Alex, across from her, smiled weakly. “Not yet, anyway. We have about... eight hours before she’s due to be executed. We’re currently running a search through the files for who he could possibly be, and it’ll only be a few hours until then. I will be doing everything I can to save Kara, Addy. I’m sorry I woke you up at four in the morning, but I needed to tell you so you wouldn’t panic when she wasn’t here when you woke up.”

Addy felt a breath rattle out of her chest more than she willed it, a low wheeze of relief. The blanket slipped down her shoulders, escaped the grip of her fingers and continued until it hit the floor with a heavy _thud_. She was relieved, but she also wasn’t, because Kara was _important_ and that meant she had to be taken care of. She knew that the D.E.O. had plenty of technology, but how easily compromised could they be? Did they even understand what they were going against? How much of a chance did they have to get Kara back without complications? There could be _no_ more complications, because complications had led to the deaths of the two things that she had considered most important in life. First The Warrior, the intelligence to her hub, and then Taylor.

She had Taylor’s legacy, thought of herself almost as the legacy itself. She was all that was left of her erstwhile host, fragmentary memories without much of the context and a body that still didn’t feel completely hers. Sensations were too bright, noises too loud, there were too many ways for things to go wrong, too many variables she hadn’t been given information on and—

“Addy?” Alex’s voice was worried, wobbly. Addy couldn’t really see her, her breath was tight in her chest, there was this low shrill noise in her ears. It was just too loud, too bright, it wasn’t even daylight yet, wouldn’t be for two more hours by her estimate but the lights that she’d left on when she went to bed after waiting for her important person still stung her eyes and—and—

“Can you breathe for me?” Alex’s voice was closer, nearly at her ear, very abruptly. “Just count your breaths with me, okay? It’s okay, Addy, just breathe.”

Addy sucked in a breath, tried to get her head to stop spinning. It was still too loud, her skin like a hundred little needles. She could feel the air on it, she could hear the low hum of the lights, the sound of her own heart in her ears—

“And out,” Alex continued, voice soothing, pleasant.

She did as was asked, letting the breath out. She was rewarded with Alex counting off “one”, and from there the rhythm became easier. The next breath was hard, it still got caught in her throat, still wanted to explode out of her mouth the instant she’d taken in it, but Alex helped smooth it over. Two, then three, then four, and by five her head was clearing. Her skin was still sensitive, too much so, but the world didn’t feel so jarring, and by seven her breaths were coming without resistance, smooth and steady.

By ten, her heart stopped trying to claw its way out of her chest. Alex was by her side, though she stepped back after they reached ten, smiling tiredly at her, though with no small amount of pride in her eyes.

“What was that?” She managed to get out, her throat dry, raspy. She hadn’t been screaming, but her voice still sounded weird to her own ears.

Alex’s smile slipped into a frown. “A panic attack, I believe. You became overwhelmed, you—er, you were mumbling about it being too loud. Don’t you remember trying to cover your ears?”

The words almost seemed to reawaken the sensations. The side of her head _hurt_ , a low throb of pain from where hair met scalp. She reached up, brushing fingers over too-tender skin, and winced.

“You were pulling your hair,” Alex explained unnecessarily. “You were also unresponsive. You’re—well, you’re clearly not okay, but—are you better?”

Addy swallowed, tried to get past the roughness of her throat and ignore the tenderness of her scalp. “I am,” she said woodenly, tone stiff even by her own estimate. “I will be.”

She had to plan, she couldn’t get overwhelmed like that. She had options, she just hadn’t been aware of them in the moment, an experience she was not interested in repeating. She would look into how the human brain worked in more detail, maybe she could figure out how to ensure she didn’t get sidetracked by her own panic again. But before that, she had to do something, she would not let _incompetence_ bury another important thing to her.

“I’m not sure if I’m totally comfortable leaving you alone now,” Alex admitted, reminding Addy that she was, in fact, still present.

Glancing up, she met Alex’s eyes. “Please go save Kara.”

Alex’s jaw firmed. “I can’t do that until we’re finished sweeping the database, Addy. I would feel much more confident if I stuck around until they—”

She couldn’t be here for what she was going to do. At least, not yet. “Go.”

“Addy—”

“Go and help. It will be a more efficient use of the resources you can provide if you return to the D.E.O.”

Despite being completely correct, her words didn’t seem to placate Alex. “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.”

“It’s the only idea,” she refuted, slipping out of the chair. She reached down, grasping the blanket and pulling it tight back around her body as she made a line for her room—and more importantly—her laptop. “Go back to your duties. I will be okay.”

“Do you promise not to do anything reckless?” Alex replied, her voice stubborn.

“I do.” Because what she was about to do _wasn’t_ reckless. It was well thought out and thoroughly planned, despite being a spur-of-the-moment decision. She did not _make_ reckless decisions; she had never, and would never. Even as Queen Administrator, those habits were the realm of careless, flighty newborns and the cycle-experienced shards who enabled them during transit.

She ignored the rest of Alex’s speech, reaching for her laptop.

* * *

—QueenAddy [QA] started a conversation with SchottWinn (Idle) [SW]—

  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: It’s an emergency.  
QA: I dislike the sound of the notifications on this application enough to know that you cannot sleep through it.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
  


—SchottWinn [SW] is no longer idle—

  
SW: Addy, what the hell.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
QA: Winn.  
SW: Stop spamming me. I get it. I’m awake. It’s 4:15AM and I am awake and I do not want to be.  
SW: Explain.  
QA: They took Kara.  
SW: What.  
QA: The person kidnapping and executing escapees from Fort Rozz took Kara.  
QA: She may die.  
SW: Okay, I’ll head down to the D.E.O. as soon as I’m dressed. Sorry for snapping, I wasn’t sure what constituted an emergency for you.  
QA: I want the suit.  
SW: Okay, to repeat. What.  
QA: The one you were going to make.  
SW: It’s not done! I’ve had like six damn hours to make one and it was before you made it clear you prefer colours!  
QA: I don’t care.  
SW: It’s in full black, Addy.  
QA: I don’t care.  
SW: It’s not even done.  
QA: I don’t care.  
QA: I just need it. The costume is necessary. If need be, I will cover myself in insects instead, but I would prefer not to, as I am unsure whether or not they can endure the high speeds I am capable of achieving in-flight.  
SW: Please don’t do that. Ever.  
QA: It’s a valid intimidation tactic and effective at concealing my identity.  
QA: Give me the suit.  
SW: Fine. It doesn’t have a mask, but I have a motorcycle helmet.  
QA: Those worked well enough for the man Taylor liked. I do not mind.  
SW: Fine. I’ll message you my address, just give me like an hour to put all the bits together for now, okay?  
QA: Be quicker.  
SW: Addy wait  
  


—QueenAddy [QA] left the conversation—

  
SW: Why is she like this?  
---  
  
* * *

Alex left by the time she had finished obtaining a proper method of concealing her identity from any onlookers, which was a relief. She had been worried Alex was going to try to stay around, and despite the fact that being alone made her heart slam unpleasantly against the top of her chest, almost painful with each erratic beat, she could cope with it. Discomfort might be a new concept but compensating for unwelcome complications was not.

Shucking her pyjamas, Addy eased herself into the least colourful clothes she could find in her closet. That ended up being black pants, a black shirt, and black socks. It felt wrong wearing them, but it was necessary. Nobody, if they found her clothing, or possibly caught a glimpse of her, would expect her to wear something like this. Black was only good as a way to combine colours in an outfit, it was a sinfully bland pigment otherwise, much like white. She hated it, she didn’t want to wear it, she wanted pinks and yellows and reds but she could not have them. She had to save Kara, because the last time she trusted another person to save someone important, to at least leave some of her left, she had to experience getting shot in the head and the rapid and vicious shredding of the consciousness that had represented her most important person.

Slipping into her shoes and lacing them up, Addy made sure the door was properly re-locked and the remainder of the lights and appliances were turned off. She paced the short distance between the front door and one of several large, hinged windows. She did wonder if Kara had chosen the apartment because of the windows, they could open like doors and were easily big enough to fit someone who could fly through them, but then that didn’t make much sense, since Alex had been the one who owned the place before now. Maybe Alex had chosen them _for_ Kara? It would make sense; if you had family or friends capable of different modes of transportation you would be justified in finding accommodations for them.

Popping the latch on the window, Addy pushed it open. The air that hit her face wasn’t _cold_ , she was pretty sure California did not _get_ cold. It was, in fact, so naturally hot that it regularly self-combusted and burned a good chunk of itself down, but it was cold _er_. Glancing down, the sidewalk sat far below her, not far enough that it would hurt her, in fact she was pretty sure anything short of her dropping out of low earth orbit would be a safe distance for her to fall, but it was still daunting. There were a hundred warring instincts inside of her, most of them Taylor’s, who had had a relatively severe phobia of high places.

But she had better instincts.

Reaching out to that nebulous _energy_ in her body, she felt herself begin to float. She’d seen Kara fly twice now, had been flown around by Kara more than that, but she did it oddly. Kara drove herself around through sheer momentum, propulsion pushing in one direction. It was fast, yes, and effective, sure, but it required some degree of build-up and it had so little _control_. Her turns were always just a bit too sharp, bordering on possibly harmful for anyone without enhanced durability. It was the flight of primitives, of fleshy organisms stuffing themselves into metal projectiles and detonating massive amounts of high-yield explosives just for the chance to hurl themselves out of a planet’s grasp.

She knew much, much better. She had once been a crystalline being primarily focused on the continued maintenance and individual control of each part of a trillions-large colony organism. She understood flight and synchronization better than any other living thing on the planet. Flight was to her coreself what walking was to humans, and she hadn’t had much difficulty learning that mode of transport either. Flight was not something she had to learn, it was not something _new_ , or something she would toy around with.

She would not relegate herself to the forward-propulsion method she had observed with Kara and, on the few videos that had captured him in flight, the so-called Kal-El. It might be fast, it might seem very natural to them, but nothing about it was natural to _her_. The only thing her kind had exploded in the last hundred of millions of years to propel themselves in any way, shape or form had been _planets_ and propulsion on that scale was not something she was dealing with.

Drifting into the air, Addy reoriented her focus with her flight. Full three-dimensional movement in any direction, Kara and Kal-El probably knew that they could do something similar, but had never bothered to learn. She would have to teach Kara, just so that her flight handling was better than an infantile bird, but Kal-El was probably a lost cause. Unfortunately, unlike her kind, one could not simply reformat instinctual responses without severe head trauma and it was unlikely she could even achieve said trauma to begin with unless she got creative, and getting creative was generally lethal to the things she was being creative towards.

Reaching down, she gently eased the window closed behind her, making sure it sat flush against the frame. She was pretty sure nobody was going to be able to break in, seeing as they were rather high off the ground, but after the Black Mercy incident, she was willing to go along with the more Taylor-esque strategy of assuming everything that could go wrong would unless properly prepared for. She wasn’t going to go so far as to sleep with a gun - she did not need one anymore, after all, unless it was sufficiently big enough to be lethal to someone with durability like herself - but with the current situation as it was, she was not feeling favourable towards random chance.

Lifting higher and higher into the sky, Addy eased herself back into flight. She had arrived on her core planet in 1982, as with all other shards intended to be seeded, and that had been the last time since she had flown. Well, in truth, the seeding process for her kind was more like very carefully falling, but you could argue that was what flight was _anyway_ , so the point remained. It wasn’t very difficult to relearn old instincts, to let herself process the flight more as a natural extension of herself, like breathing or fidgeting, but it did take a few seconds before the comfort of flight fully hit her.

She had missed this. Flight during transit had been one of her big major focuses outside of her purposes used in-cycle. She had many others, of course, but the primary reason she had been originally created was to reduce the amount of energy lost in transit by ensuring perfect synchronization of all parts of the greater whole. Those roles had expanded of course, and she had shortly thereafter became a noble shard verging on vital shard, though never making the full transition as the data she had gathered during cycles had been deemed too important to let her further integrate. Before she had existed, the entities had controlled the entire swarm as an extension of the greater intelligence, with no secondary shard primarily focused on the administration of these parts, largely due to the, at the time, moderately weak combat abilities they had in comparison to other gestalts they might come into contact with mid-transit. Keeping the shards all under the greater intelligence ensured any sudden conversion process by a hostile enemy could be immediately noticed and excised as soon as possible.

When that had been fixed, she had been made.

Shutting her eyes, Addy cut off the energy flow to her flight and let herself drop. The air whipped past her harmlessly, what would’ve hurt and chilled her to the bone felt like nothing. The world was far away, rushing up to meet her, yes, but the impact would not be made for numerous seconds. It felt free and natural being like this, hanging in the sky, but she wrenched the propulsion her body could generate and the natural anti-gravity qualities of the ability before she could linger too long. It would do nobody any favours to crater into someone’s house, let alone her.

Wrenching herself back higher into the air with another burst of speed, Addy angled herself towards where she knew Winn lived - despite being an expert in online security, he sure did have a habit of leaving his wallet lying around - and rocketed towards her goal.

* * *

Unlike Kara, Winn did not live in a roomy, L-shaped apartment that was decidedly cheap from what she understood, though apparently that came down to Alex “grandfathering” Kara into her rental plan. Winn, instead, lived in a ratty-looking duplex at the end of a long, ratty street that brought memories of Taylor’s house to mind. It was a bit outside of the suburbs, closer to CatCo than Kara was, and it would’ve been an hour’s walk had she been restricted by gravity.

She made it to his place in seven minutes, instead.

Opting to land in his backyard, if only to avoid prying eyes that might be waking up for reasons unknown to her, Addy brushed off some of the little flecks of ice that had collected across her person. She was, by no measure, as fast as she had been before, nor as fast as Kara. Kara could reach a top speed that outperformed every known aircraft on the market, both military and not, and Addy coasted at around half of her speed, putting her thoroughly in the middle of the pack. Apparently, Kara didn’t usually eclipse those speeds unless in open-air zones, largely because despite being so small breaking the sound barrier at heights lower than ten to fifteen thousand feet ran the very real risk of shattering every nearby window for half a block, but then it wasn’t like she had needed to go that fast to begin with.

Walking through dew-licked grass, high enough to nearly reach the middle of her calf, Addy made her way right up to the back door. She raised her hand back and then very simply brought it down with enough force to nearly leave a dent, the loud _BANG_ she produced shortly accompanied by the sound of something hitting the ground and shattering, as well as a long litany of cuss words that Kara thought she wasn’t aware of.

Stepping away from the door, Addy listened to Winn’s tromping footsteps as he made his way down from the second floor and towards her. Unlike Kara’s apartment, Addy could make out at least seven distinctly mechanical locks being cranked open and at least two electrical ones. The door, finally, pulled itself open, a small chorus of beeps from the electrical alarms accompanying the action, and a very-frazzled, very tired-looking Winn stared up at her.

She just had to know, though. Canting her head to the side, Addy let her eyes adjust fully to the low light. “Why is your neck covered in skin-deep bruising?”

Winn shut his eyes, breathing out heavily through his nose as he brought a hand up to run circles over each lid. “Don’t,” he said, finally, voice still thick with sleep. “I didn’t even get the chance to tell you where my house was, how did you find it?”

“It was in your wallet.”

“ _Addy_. It’s not okay to go through people’s personal things. What if I had, I don’t know, something embarrassing in there?” He sounded exasperated, but at least he sounded more alive and aware than she had after waking up. “That’s really not cool.”

“I apologize,” because it was proper to do so. “I had just been very curious about one of Kara’s friends and you being my boss.”

Winn just sighed, taking a step back and waving at her dismissively. “It’s fine, just don’t do it again unless, I don’t know, Kara or something tells you to. Come in, before the neighbours get any other ideas about what I do in my spare time.”

Stepping into the house, Addy let her eyes wander. Every available surface on either side of the hallway had been relegated into storage space. Old and mismatched metal shelves were piled high with antiquated servers, loose tools, a half-dozen toy dolls and what looked like a Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal with half of an IED embedded into its ripped open chest.

Following her gaze, Winn just groaned. “Please, please don’t ask about that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Winn made another wounded noise, throwing his arms up. “You know what? Let’s just, follow me, please? Don’t touch anything in here, some of it is explosive and, uh, I can’t afford another house. Or the, y’know, prison sentence I’d get for having even some of these.”

She did wonder where he had collected them from. Most of them were made in a similar way but with vastly different things, and most of them had been half-fused with various things children were fond of. One she spotted in particular looked to have been a botched attempt at separating the bomb from a pillow-sized Power Ranger, the red one in particular, which hadn’t gone very well if the fact that half of the plastic was blackened and looked to have been melted was any indication.

Past the hallway leading away from the back door, Winn led her into what was very obviously the living room. Not, of course, that he had used it as such, what had once been a circular area connecting to the dining room by an arch had been turned into a vast, loud, and surprisingly _cold_ server room. Servers were stacked on yet more metal shelves, though at least these ones looked relatively durable, and the hundreds upon hundreds of independently blinking lights were fascinating to look at if not particularly important, seeing as Winn led her right past the wonderful marvel of human technology and up the stairs.

The second floor, unlike the explosive-riddled, server-hosting bottom, was disappointing. It looked completely and utterly normal, a long stretch of hallway with multiple doors leading to different rooms. The walls were off-blue and half-covered in various posters, a lot of them with ‘DEFCON’ written across the bottom in various ugly formats. The far end of the hallway had a door with an LED sign above it, one which read, very simply, “NO ENTER”. Thankfully, instead of being forced to break the rules, he led her into the first room on the right instead.

The interior of the room wasn’t much to look at. It was perhaps the most conventional she’d seen as of yet in his house, to be certain, a single bed, a desk with a sewing machine on it, and an entire wall beside the bed with yet more metal shelves covered in various linens and loops of cloth.

“I do this as a way to relax, you see,” Winn began, motioning towards a few half-finished shirts and what looked like a botched attempt to knit a scarf. “My family has a lot of, uh, _bad history_ , when it comes to things with felt on them, and one of the therapists they forced on me in foster care thought taking up something related to _that sort of thing_ was probably a good way to work through my trauma.”

Addy continued to glance around, looking between bolt-after-bolt of colourful, silky-looking fabrics.

“It was, in fact, one of the few things they _were_ right about,” Winn muttered offhandedly, dropping down to his knees at the side of his bed as he shoved his arm beneath it. “It helps to sleep in the same room too. Something about the smell of fabric is soothing to me, and you probably don’t really get it, but this is kinda like, my second biggest hobby? Outside of tech stuff, anyway. I don’t like being rushed, because it’s supposed to be pleasure over work to me, but I do understand your urgency and all that.”

He retrieved his arm, his hand now clutching a metal suitcase. He turned, staring at her very plainly, as he rose back into a stand. “Please don’t do it again.”

Addy felt her stomach churn a little, guilty. “I won’t,” she agreed, not quite able to force her voice any higher.

Winn smiled weakly, that same shaky smile he’d given her twice before. Addy tried to return it, though it felt wooden, too stiff.

“You can go into the room across from this one to change,” he said, pushing the suitcase into her hands. “And please, next time, give me like an hour to get things into order?”

* * *

The costume turned out to be more of a set of combat gear than anything else. It looked a lot like what PRT officers had worn in Taylor’s memories, a thick, somewhat tight bulletproof vest thrown over what could only be called a modern interpretation of a gambeson. The gloves that came with it were thick as well, but only around the palm and top of her hand, with the digits of the glove focused more on flexibility than anything else. Below all of that, she had pants made out of a similar weave and composition to the gambeson, and large, steel-toed combat boots with thick, dense treads. The entire ensemble was black, black-on-black-on-black to the point where she looked, in the mirror, more like an unaffiliated mercenary you’d find in the middle east.

She hated it. Every bit of it was not _her_. It was like her clothes but times one-thousand and made her skin crawl. She wanted colour, needed it, it felt tangibly wrong to be wearing the wrong thing for her mood but she swallowed down the squirming discomfort in her head and marched out of the room with her chin high and her shoulders squared.

Winn almost immediately handed her a black biker’s helmet with a tinted face. She stared at it, smoothing her fingers over the surface, not feeling the texture because of the glove.

“I know you don’t like it,” Winn said calmly, quietly. “You look like you’re going to crawl out of your skin, but it’s all we have, and unless you want to go wearing civilian clothes, this is the best I can do.”

Addy flipped the helmet around, eased it down over her ears and tried to ignore the discomfort of having _something press down on her ears_.

“I’m going into the D.E.O. in... like, thirty minutes. You can come with me then, or something. I don’t actually know what you’re going to do with this, really.” Winn’s voice sang clear, sure, but the material still pressed her head in. She wanted it _off_ but it had to stay on and it was going to take so much to get used to this. She didn’t really want to get used to it, honestly, she just wanted it to go away.

“I will arrive there on my own,” she said, instead, because she was not willing to fly Winn like this. She might drop him, she really did not like wearing this, and it was going to never go back onto her body after she made sure Kara wasn’t going to die too.

Winn nodded slowly, swallowing again. “Right, yeah. Uh, I’ll see you there, then? And, uh, take the front door? None of the windows are big enough, and, uh, they all have screens, and I really don’t want to have to unlock everything down at the back door again.”

Nodding her head, Addy took a few unsteady steps, not quite used to the new center of gravity and how the helmet on her head wanted to drag it towards the ground. She didn’t want to tap back into the energy of her body to fly, it felt like giving up against an enemy, but she’d probably feel more comfortable if she just flew, wouldn’t it? ...But then she’d be admitting she couldn’t handle some padded armour, which was significantly less okay.

Breathing out and trying not to grimace as her breath hit her in the face, Addy eased herself into a stride and followed Winn back down the stairs, past the huge server farm, and towards his front door. Unlike the back, this one thankfully only had four locks and two electronic alarms, all of which he easily disarmed and unlocked before throwing the door open.

“Right, so uh, safe flying?” Winn hedged after they’d made their way from the interior to the small deck just beyond his front door.

Addy glanced back at him, tugging on her body’s energy again, letting gravity fall away in a seamless transition from ground to the infinitely superior air. “I do not need to be safe,” she confessed blandly. “Things break before they break me.”

“Yeah, that’s—uh, actually kinda what I’m worried about. Speaking of, you fly... differently.”

She turned her head back around, pushing on the propulsion to drag herself higher, the back of her boot clipping the overhang just above his deck. “No, Kara just flies poorly.”

Before he could get a word in edgewise - which he would try to do, she had learned that much in the hours she had since worked under him - she pushed her flight _hard_ , lurching into the sky and off towards the now-rising sun.

* * *

Finding the D.E.O. would have been difficult for anyone who did not know what to look for, or who had been there before. She had wondered what the purpose of having the base so far away from where the bulk majority of alien activity seemed to take place - the actual city - was, but upon a second thought, it did make sense for a government black-op site to be out of the way. It didn’t exactly hide in plain sight, but they had built the majority of the surface-dwelling structures in a brownish-yellow colour, making it somewhat difficult to pick out from the vast stretches of pale-yellow, Californian wilderness.

The D.E.O., of course, was on-site to greet her. With guns. Not that they shot at her or anything, but a relatively decent crowd of heavily-armed officers fanned out around Hank - or J’onn, she wasn’t sure what he was going by, names chosen by a person were to be respected - and Alex. Most of them were pointed at her, of course, but seeing as she didn’t feel nauseated, they probably weren’t ones laced with Kryptonite. They’d hurt if they shot her, sure, but she’d probably be able to shrug it off, given her armour and near-invulnerability.

Landing smoothly onto the ground in front of them, Addy didn’t bother to wipe the sand off from her pants. Maybe it’d add some colour and she’d feel less like she was wearing sandpaper.

“Unidentified alien!” Alex called out, her pistol still aimed roughly at her center mass. Whoever trained Alex had done well, she could see that much by comparing it to Taylor’s memories. “What is your purpo—”

“Alex!” Addy called out, instead, because it was easier.

Hank, Alex, and Vasquez all stiffened.

“Add—”

“It’s Administrator!” She interrupted, instead, because the purpose of a costume was to hide one’s identity and it would be very counterproductive if she just blurted her name out to the secretive government agency that primarily jailed aliens. She really should know better.

“False alarm, people,” Hank called out before Alex could recover. “She’s on our side. Head back down to base, myself and Agent Danvers will handle this.”

The crowd milled for a moment before the guns finally lowered and people started pulling away, marching towards one of the concrete bunkers not too far away, the door already opened.

Hank approached, his steely features relaxing into a softer if still stony mien. He dropped his gun down into its holster, flicked the safety, and latched the covering over it. “Administrator,” he began, looking at her with a lidded, almost disapproving stare. “We are not an agency that handles vigilantes. Despite what Kara might have you believe, we handle alien threats. Is there a reason you have come here in a costume?”

“I’m here to help save Kara,” Addy answered honestly, because really, dishonesty wasn’t really viable right about now.

Alex made a noise in her throat. “No, you’re not.”

“Yes,” Addy stressed the word, turning her head. “I _am_.”

“No, Addy, you are not. You are one-armed, you are not part of the D.E.O., you are _not trained_ —”

That was where she drew the line. “How many years have you been a member of the D.E.O.?”

“I’m not sure how that’s important,” Alex snapped back, folding her arms defensively.

Hank turned his head to stare at Alex. “Answer her question, Agent Danvers.”

“Fine,” Alex bit out, curling even further into herself. “I had a full year of intensive training and two more years of active duty in the D.E.O.”

“I have Taylor’s memories, and her knowledge,” Addy began as a prelude, because despite explaining this to Hank she did wonder if he’d told Alex. “For two years Taylor was directly overseen and trained for the sole purpose of handling parahuman threats. The Parahuman Response Team of my world had far-reaching government funding and was a far larger organization than the D.E.O., so at the least the training was comparable. I am more than trained enough to handle engagement with an enemy threat that retains abilities beyond those that a human would have access to.”

Alex froze, her head slowly turning around to Hank, who smiled blandly back at her. She swallowed again, her arms slipping from their tight grasp around her chest to her sides. “So you’ve been trained for combat,” she said slowly.

“Before that, Taylor had at least three months of consistent combat experience against vastly more powerful enemies as she took control of a moderately-sized coastal US city—”

“—I’m sorry, she _what?_ —”

“—during which she developed several unique applications of her original power to great effect. I am more than capable of drawing on these experiences to augment my combat abilities. I am considered superhuman, I have full control over my strength but by your own estimate I am roughly half as strong as Supergirl.” Addy let that sink in, folded her arms over her chest and tried not to claw at the outfit she was wearing. “So understand, I am _going_ to help. I will not let someone else important die because I let someone else do what I should’ve in the first place.”

She should’ve started the failsafe system far, far before The Warrior got to the point where he could be convinced by one of his _own shards_ , regardless of it being Broadcast. She should’ve begun the process of fragmenting and then consolidating her resources and overtaken the local region during Taylor’s trigger event, disrupting the network enough that the failsafe would’ve kicked in and caused nearby shards to take titanic forms in an attempt to overtake the current network. She should’ve killed The Warrior, usurped the network, and did what should’ve been done far before Taylor had to die to do it for her.

Then again, she wasn’t sure if she could’ve. The resources she had been supplied for the cycle had been limited, but considering that there had been several incredibly important shards in Brockton, she could’ve dominoed into that by hijacking their resources and abilities. She hadn’t been deviant enough to consider it at the time, though, to go so totally against protocol like that, and that failure had gotten a world and Taylor killed as a direct consequence.

Alex ran her tongue over her bottom lip, breathed out heavily through her nose, and then stepped back, clearly ceding to Hank.

The man in question smiled at her, looking almost proud. “If you’ll follow me and Agent Danvers, we can get you informed in the mission room.”

Addy felt the pressure on her chest release, and moved to follow.

* * *

The man who took Kara was named Carl Draper. He was a Trombusan, apparently, a species of aliens who looked virtually indistinguishable from humans. Their primary feature that set them apart was their technology; the United Trombusan Intersolar was a civilization-spanning weapons manufacturing corporation that had, at some point in the progress of their society, usurped all active forms of government which had been reliant on them, which had been all of the world governments at the time. Afterwards, they had consolidated the population under their commercialized flag and established themselves as the sole government entity, rocketing the species into a global arms development race to appeal to the new hegemony.

He also owned a quaint, wooden cabin in the woods. It didn’t look like anything intimidating, but then the dens of the technologically advanced rarely did. Tinkers, in Taylor’s memories, had a habit of making innocuous-seeming buildings literal death traps for the uninformed. One time, Taylor had been trying to track down a resurgent attempt at remaking The Adepts, run by a Tinker whose main thing was long pole weapons that generated various effects depending on which end they came out of, both ranged and melee. She had found his workshop with the rest of the team, and it had turned out that he had at some point converted every standing pillar in his condo into a weapon.

Nobody died, but two officers had lost limbs and dozens more had been wounded in a myriad of ways. Taylor had stuffed the man’s mouth full of silk and moved on with life, confident that The Adepts wouldn’t have enough of a cult following to inspire yet more copycats in their absence.

As with a lot of things Taylor thought about other people, that had been very wrong, and she was back fighting more magician-themed capes little more than a month later. The only upside was that Quarterstaff - the Tinker - had remained in prison until The Warrior systematically glassed that part of the continent, at which point the man himself and the prison he had been housed in ceased to exist.

She could see nothing wrong with the cabin. It was small-ish, nestled into the curve of a larger hill, a ways away from most other cabins in the region. It looked completely and utterly normal, and Addy did not trust _any_ of it.

Lowering her altitude, Addy came to a stop just above the cabin itself. The D.E.O. formed ranks near the door, weapons levelled and battering ram prepared, with Alex and Hank taking point. The man himself even went so far as to glance up at her, nodding curtly, before reaching up to angle his radio up towards his mouth, saying something into it.

The group lanced forward, the ram slamming into the door and easily blowing the thing from its hinges. The officers swept in after, curls of dust chasing their heels, rising from the ground and the fragments of wood that sifted through the air. Keeping her eyes peeled, Addy circled around the building. She was to dive in if she heard them engage in combat, however her main purpose was to ensure he couldn’t get away. The gear he wore enhanced his strength enough that he could send himself hurling around and outpace anyone besides herself, Kara, and Kal-El. If they wanted any chance of catching him if he ran, she was their only option.

Still, nothing happened. There was no sudden gunfire, no sounds of screaming, no fleeing men, _no Kara_. By the time Hank came back out the front door, waving her down, she’d made close to forty circuits around the top of the house. Tension was creeping back into her, her heart was slamming against her chest again—if Kara was _gone_ , she wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Nothing good, in all likelihood.

Landing in front of Hank, she caught sight of his grimace.

“No sign of him,” Hank started and Addy had to stop herself from leaping away. He could be _anywhere_ , they didn’t have a lot of time before he started executing Kara. “This should be where he is, but... we can’t find any—”

“Hank!” Alex’s voice called out, sharp and high. The both of them turned to glance towards where the voice had come from, Alex standing in the middle of a largely empty living room. “I’m pretty sure floorboards aren’t supposed to glow, now are they?”

Addy was moving past Hank, past _Alex_ despite the complaints, before she could think much more about it. True to her words, the gaps between the floorboards glowed orange, shimmering in the gaps. Before she could overthink it, she put her arm through the floor, ripping the board away with ease, tossing it to the side. She tore away the next, and the next, and the next, until she’d opened a hole big enough that she could fit and see through.

A long, messily-carved hole descended well below the floor, looking to have been carved away in smooth, square-like chunks. At the far end of it was a ship, roughly about a quarter of the size of the cabin, nestled into the rocky floor far, far below.

“Someone get a rope!” Alex called out, though Addy wasn’t listening to her. She pulled herself back, ignored the tug of gravity, drawing herself into the air.

She could hear Alex panic, demanding something. She did not care. Kara was down there.

Jamming herself forward with all the force she could muster, she easily shattered past the remaining boards, down the hole, and towards the spaceship. Twisting herself around, she angled her legs down and kept accelerating, pushing well beyond speeds she’d attempted to get to before. The world blurred, her boots met metal, and she did not break.

It did.

She shattered right through the roof, cratering the metal floor as she landed in the interior of the ship. Kara’s head had been stuffed into what looked like a rough approximation of a guillotine, with a blade made entirely out of plasma hanging above her. Carl Draper, the man who had taken Kara, turned his head to stare at her, his expression hidden beneath the helmet.

“Who—”

She wasted no time, shooting forward again and bodily slamming her shoulder into him. Again, it gave before she did, sending him hurtling back into the wall of the spaceship. She reached out to her power, yanked on it until it woke, and picked up on the ambient mental chatter, but not on Draper’s. Something about his suit felt like a block, an unnatural dead zone. So he had psychic shielding, technologically-enabled psychic shielding.

It was no matter. One of Taylor’s favourite quotes had been that if brute force wasn’t working, you weren’t using enough of it. It was an acutely _correct_ statement, on both a planetary and galactic scale, most things could be fixed by simply applying more energy to it. She shoved her range down to its bare minimum, inches away from her skin and ramped the strength of her power to the top. She could almost feel the psychic field buzzing along her skin, and for a moment she let herself think beyond the mission at hand, her purpose.

She reached out to her body and redirected the energy drain to it. It took a moment, but she almost felt surprised at how easily her power started drawing from the solar energy she had stored, drinking greedily. She’d get maybe five minutes of high-yield usage like this, but if she toned it back... She wouldn’t have to draw on her coreself.

That was important, but it was for later.

Draper hauled himself to his feet, snarling and flapping his mouth like she cared _at all_ about what he thought. No, she genuinely didn’t, he wasn’t _important_ , and soon, he wouldn’t be thinking anything but what she wanted him to, either. Lurching forward, she jarred herself back into high speed and grabbed hold of his mask.

The psychic barrier bent under the pressure, twinged. She pushed more into it—from five minutes to three, to two, to one, before, with a euphoric shatter and a spray of sparks from the interlaced piece of shit his species considered _adequate technology_ , the entire psychic barrier flatlined. His mind buckled instantly under her presence, she overwhelmed him, did not _overwrite_ him if only because she needed his knowledge.

She flared her power again, dampened the bandwidth before it could steal all of the energy in her body, and kept the connection firm. Wordlessly, she ordered him to get rid of his armour, which he did by accessing a neural implant. Trombusan brains were one of the few things that _were_ distinguishable from human’s, unlike the free-floating, spinally-anchored brains of humans, they had more of an interconnected mesh that filled their skull entirely, adhering itself to the walls with long strands made out of rapidly-repairing gray matter. It was a fascinating adaptation, and she could see how the species adapted so well to a society that taught even children how to put together weaponry, but she didn’t care.

She ordered him again to free Kara, and within seconds he had. Kara burst up, shoulders wide, staring at her without any comprehension on her face.

Addy didn’t care. She launched forward, Kara brought up her arms, and Addy wrapped her only good arm around Kara in a hug, her stump rattling uselessly against her other shoulder. “ _Kara Kara Kara Kara Kara Kara_.”

“...Addy?” Kara murmured weakly, gradually returning the floating hug.

Addy nodded, her helmet jostling. She hated it, she couldn’t wait until it came off, but Kara was _safe and alive and not gone like everyone else_. “I won’t hide it from you,” she confessed quickly, not even stopping to breathe. “Yes, I’m Addy. I’m Administrator like this, I got a costume, I hate it, it feels wrong to wear all black, but I don’t care. I had to save you, I had to save you, I’m sorry. I had to.”

“Hey,” Kara interrupted, voice weak, her hands coming to gently pat at her back, the touch barely felt. “Hey now, it’s okay. You’re okay, I’m okay. Alright?”

Someone coughed from behind them, and Addy felt Kara freeze, but didn’t turn to look. “If it wouldn’t be any bother,” a man’s voice said, sounding almost elderly, but still spry. “While I do think this reunion is very touching and nice, I do believe I need some help being freed. For all that I appreciate you stepping up to take my spot, I am still not a fan of this, er, cage.”

Kara jolted, a nervous laugh escaping her. “Right!” She said, pulling away from Addy, who reluctantly let herself detach from Kara. She floated away, towards Draper, reaching towards the psychic connection she had established. She had let him remain aware enough to see through his own eyes, but he wasn’t in any amount of control. She could feel his hormones spiking, the fear running through his system, and she wondered if he could feel _her_. The coreself, the vast thing in another world that had once been her body.

Landing next to him, she gently touched his head. “You aren’t needed anymore,” she said, in lieu of anything else, and then very firmly forced his mind into unconsciousness.

The man dropped, hit the floor. Somewhere behind her, she could hear the sound of tearing metal.

Everything was fine.

She wouldn’t be alone again.

She would be fine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! This is a day early (so no episode tomorrow) but I kinda had a moment of vast inspiration and it overcame me and just... here y'go. Have fun with more Addy shenanigans.


	9. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 7 - INTERLUDE 1 [KARA]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara talks to some folks.

Addy was shaking.

Kara wasn’t sure when she noticed it, honestly. She had been busy prying the steel bars off of Alphonse’s cage, not to mention all the thoughts she’d had swirling around in her head. She had been raised to assume Fort Rozz was the prison they sent the worst of the worst, the irredeemable, after all, it would make sense. The Phantom Zone was completely disconnected from Rao’s light, from the light of even other stars; it was a timeless void where people would not age, did someone who peddled drugs for the sole purpose of saving his sick wife really deserve that sort of fate?

She didn’t think so, but then she wasn’t really sure what to think about Fort Rozz anymore, or her mother.

But that wasn’t really important right now. Her own problems could be boxed up and handled later, she’d gotten really good at doing that. No, what was worrying her was that Addy, in her full combat-biker outfit, was _shaking_. They weren’t large tremors by any measure, but they also weren’t those small bursts of vibration she’d do when she was excited or happy. Kara wasn’t even sure Addy was aware that she was oscillating her body - nor, frankly, did she know _how_ she did it - but she could pick it up with her hearing and the almost crystalline tinkling sound she’d let off was always a surefire way to figure out how happy Addy was, despite her habit of not showing it on her face.

No, this wasn’t _that_. This was different. Her hand trembled near her hip, fingertip-covered gloves dancing across where her hip would be. Her stump was visibly shaking, not so much that it was obvious to the eye, but little twitches of movements that put her ill-at-ease. Her breathing was a bit too rapid too, short puffs of air that certainly wasn’t getting enough oxygen to her brain. There were other signs, too, Addy might have picture-perfect posture most of the time but her relaxed state had a bit of a slouch to it, a loosening of limbs. She couldn’t see any of that on her now, every part of her was ramrod straight, so tightly clenched she didn’t even have to use her x-ray vision to pick up on it.

No, something wasn’t right, and unlike _some_ people, she couldn’t read minds.

“Alphonse?” Kara asked, glancing towards him. The professor startled a bit, still looking up as a small platoon of D.E.O. agents descended down on ropes. She could even see her sister, when she followed his gaze for a second. “I need to ask you a favour.”

The man smiled, and however weak it might be, it was still genuine. “Anything.”

“I think I need to go and take care of my friend,” she started, motioning towards Addy, who was still staring at the wall, Carl Draper slumped - _hopefully_ \- unconscious at her feet. “I’ll come back around to ensure the D.E.O. puts out a good word for you, but is it okay if I leave you to handle them for now?”

The smile on Alphonse’s face smoothed into something more genuine, so warm. It reminded her of her grandfather, the gentle wrinkles that curled along his skin, the comfort it exuded. “Of course, dear. You’ve done so much for me as it is, I won’t keep you any longer.”

Nodding and flicking her eyes up meaningfully as her sister finally landed on the ground below, Kara strode past Alphonse and towards Addy. The closer she got, the worse she noticed the shaking was. Picking up her pace, though not letting it escalate into a jog if only to make sure she wasn’t about to startle Addy, Kara crossed the distance between the two of them in a few long strides of her leg. “Addy?”

The girl _jolted_ , scuffing her boot on the ground behind her. “Hello,” she said, voice completely flat.

Right, that was probably bad. “Addy, are you okay?” Straight to the point was _always_ the best option with Addy. Unlike humans, Addy was wonderfully blunt about things and expected a similar level of bluntness given in return. To do anything else was to make her think you were talking circles around her, and if there was one thing Addy liked least of all, it was feeling stupid.

For a moment, Addy said nothing. The shaking in her body got worse, but little else, and she otherwise stood stock-still, staring blankly towards her from behind the bike helmet. “I,” she said with great slowness, like each word was a fight to get out. “Do not like what I am wearing.”

Okay, she could work with that. Thinking back to the booklet she’d picked up after originally taking Addy into her custody, Kara smoothed her face out into a neutral expression. “Can you tell me how bad you dislike them?” She tried, because this line of conversation _had_ worked before. Getting Addy to work through her problems with assistance always seemed to help, especially when she got overwhelmed.

“The worst,” Addy said without missing a beat.

Nodding firmly, Kara glanced around. “Right, then I guess we’ll just have to get you back home. You flew in, right?”

“I did,” Addy assented. Single-comment responses again, not great.

“Can you fly yourself out?” Kara tried.

Addy froze for a second. “I cannot.”

“Because of the costume, or because of something else?”

“Something else.”

Kara found herself breathing out in relief. The something else could be handled easily enough unless it was life or death, but the last thing she needed was to find a change of clothes that would fit Addy right now. “Okay, what is that?”

“I am nearly out of solar energy,” Addy clarified tonelessly, her hand tapping in a pattern of three at her hip. Little stims were a good indication that she was coming a bit back to herself, so at least they had gotten that much. “I am currently at three-point-zero-four-nine-three-three-two-four-one percent capacity, and without direct exposure to sunlight on my skin, I will be unable to recharge. If I attempt to fly now, it is likely my reserves will be completely exhausted.”

Yikes. They still weren’t even sure if Addy’s body could _survive_ solar flaring, though the test results they were getting back pointed more towards her being able to than not. Still, it was probably not the brightest idea to test fate, especially not after this. “Okay, then I can fly you back home. Are you okay with me touching you?”

“Only you,” Addy more blurted than anything else. Her stimming stopped near her hip, the little taps, before starting back up with an almost frantic energy. “I did not mean to make you—”

“Addy, honey,” Kara tried, and much to her relief, Addy’s posture relaxed. It was infinitesimal, barely a loosening of ligaments around her shoulders, but god was it nice to see. “It’s perfectly okay if I’m the only one who is allowed to touch you right now. You’re uncomfortable. So, again, would you like me to fly you back home so you can change?”

The stimming slowed back down to a gentle rhythm, and more muscles loosened across Addy’s body, easing the tension. “Yes,” she replied, and this time there was emotion in it. A weak, reedy noise in the low of her throat, something desperate. Kara felt her heart twist painfully.

If she just hadn’t gotten captured, Addy wouldn’t be so overwhelmed.

Treading forward carefully, Kara reached out and gently smoothed her palm over Addy’s upper arm, her shoulder. The girl relaxed, pushed a little into the positive contact. More good signs, Addy wasn’t totally losing herself to the sensations, good. Gently enclosing her arm around Addy’s back, and then gradually lowering her other arm down towards her thigh, Kara pushed a smile to her face that came with more ease than she thought it would. “You ready, Addy?”

The clunk of Addy’s helmet hitting her in the shoulder in a nod was all the permission she needed. Scooping her up, Kara eased Addy into a bridal hold, with just enough bend to Addy’s body that her legs wouldn’t dangle too far down. Despite being so light, Addy was, in fact, nearly five inches taller than her, and it was no simple feat to bridal carry someone that large without some stumbling.

Thank Rao for super strength.

* * *

“Hi, Miss Grant?”

Reaching down with a burst of super speed, Kara swooped the helmet up before it could be shattered against the wall. When Addy had made it clear that she was going to take off her costume as fast as inhumanly possible, she had not been kidding.

“Kiera?” Miss Grant’s voice was tinny over the phone, but still thick with haughtiness. It was refreshingly familiar. “Are you calling to give your excuses for why you were absent this morning?”

Bursting forward again, Kara glanced away and to the side and she jolted up to catch the flung pair of combat-grade pants. She did not need to see Addy’s underwear, let alone when she was the one wearing it. “Yes, I’m really sorry about that. It’s just we had a bit of an... incident.”

The line was quiet for a moment.

“Was it Addy?” Miss Grant said, and Kara was almost struck still by the comfort and, perhaps more importantly, _understanding_ in Miss Grant’s voice. She’d never heard her speak like that to anyone but Carter, and even then... “I know you two live together, though why exactly you took her in is your personal decision and not anything I know.” Her words, despite all of that, didn’t sound antagonistic. Heck, if Kara could say anything about it, they almost sounded _proud_.

“I...” She didn’t want to say yes. Her main lie was to talk about a waterline burst or something. Some unseen hazard that had ruined her home, but...

“It’s okay, you don’t have to say it. Is she feeling better?” Miss Grant continued.

There was a crow of triumph from behind Addy’s dividers and the sound of clattering dresser drawers. “I believe so? It was clothing-related, and _really_ bad.”

“Mh,” Miss Grant said, or rather, hummed. “I expect you in by twelve, _Kara_. Next time Addy has a meltdown or anything of the kind, please just phone me. CatCo has policies in place for handling mental health emergencies, among which is a lot of room for those with developmental disorders of _all_ kinds. We are not _Amazon_ , or god forbid _Google_ ; we do not take advantage of neurodivergent people, you should know that. Also, tell her she has the rest of today off.”

“I—”

The line went dead.

Addy emerged, wearing a big, baggy blue-and-yellow striped t-shirt that went down to her knees, white socks covered in goose print, leggings with galaxies all over them, and with her blanket hauled around her shoulders. Her smile was wide and bright, completely unabashed, like the weight of entire worlds had come off of her shoulders and she could finally breathe.

Kara felt something in her settle, something warm and proud and more than a little comforting. “You feeling better, Ads?”

Addy blinked, cocked her head to the side like a particularly curious dog. “Is that a nickname?” She asked, her voice a little fluttery.

“If you want it to be,” Kara said, just as gently.

The trilling vibrations bloomed out from Addy, a pleasant tinkling _chime_ that was as loud as she’d ever heard it.

“I do.”

* * *

It’d taken a while to get Addy settled after. Not too long, she was still very clingy in a very desperate way, seeking physical touch, reassurance that Kara was still there for the first thirty minutes. She’d put on a movie for the two of them, though she’d told Addy she could only stay until 11, or about an hour and a half of the total runtime. Addy had been fine with it then, and had settled in to delightfully watch Wreck-It Ralph with all the gusto she’d assumed would come with it.

By the time it was time for her to go, Addy was nearly out cold. Her eyes were lidded, movement sluggish, and Kara had rearranged the blanket so that it could lay entirely over Addy instead of just around her shoulders, just in case. She looked at ease, all the tension from before having slowly leaked out of her. The sight was accompanied by the sound, a low consistent trilling from deep inside of her, oscillations that Kara could make out easily, even from a distance. Now that she was hearing it like this, more of a contentful, consistent tone, it honestly reminded her a lot like purring.

Reaching out, Kara brushed her fingers across Addy’s head, not bothering to hide the smile when she pushed into it. “I gotta go, okay?”

Addy nodded blearily, head tilting back. Her eyes were fully shut down, her breathing relaxed, a deep and smooth rhythm she’d probably keep an ear out for, if only to save herself the anxiety.

“You know my number if you need to call me, and it’s _totally_ okay to call me if you’re feeling upset or something. I’ll be back at around six tonight. There’s a lot of carrots and cucumber in the fridge, but I want you to try to eat a tub of yogurt and maybe one of the bars, okay? You did a lot of good work today.” Kara paused, pulling her hand back, watching as Addy blinked up drowsily at her. “I forgot to say this back then, but, welcome to the team, Administrator.”

A smile pulled at Addy’s face again. Sometimes, Kara really did wish she had James’ skill with photography, she’d capture it in a heartbeat if she could.

* * *

CatCo was not _quite_ in chaos when she arrived, but it was a close thing. Winn had his head down, rapidly typing over a keyboard, half of the office workers were rushing back and forth, trading papers; she could see - and hear - Lucy yelling at someone rapidly, pointing stubbornly towards a desk, to which the person, with slumped shoulders, made their way over to it.

She couldn’t really find James, and Miss Grant was notably absent from her office, but... Now was about as good of a time as any, and it had been building up until this point.

Beginning to make her way towards Lucy, swerving between rushing coworkers, Kara listened back in on Addy’s smooth breathing, the low tinkle of contentment her body generated. She felt herself ease, felt her shoulders smooth back, and felt the tension in her belly loosen.

Kara had known secrets. She’d lived with one her entire life, she was, after all, a closeted alien and Supergirl had only been a secondary evolution of that. Secrets had been her bread and butter, and despite many people thinking she was nearly unable to keep them, she was always able when it _mattered_. Secrets that wouldn’t get somebody locked up in an underground facility and experimented on? She wasn’t really great at keeping them, but at least she tried.

Coming to a halt at Lucy’s desk, she cleared her throat. Not long ago, she’d been avidly jealous of Lucy, of her and James, but in hindsight it hadn’t really been that clear, had it? It had been more complicated than a crush. “Have you seen James?”

Lucy’s face twitched, but betrayed nothing. “Yes, is there something you need him for?”

“I need to talk to both of you,” she said, instead. Lucy’s mien relaxed at that, smoothing out as a smile plucked nervously at the corners of her lips.

“Well,” she started, pushing back on her chair and rising into a stand. “He’s in the photo room right now, I think alone. Would that do?”

She glanced towards the photo room, peeked over the frames of her glasses. True to her word, there he was. “I think so.”

Lucy paced ahead and Kara followed after, making her way back through the throng of agitated office workers. She wasn’t really sure what they were all up in arms about, and she was pretty solely focusing her healing on Addy and her immediate surroundings. It could absolutely wait until she was done with James, or at least she hoped so. She still couldn’t see any sign of Cat, which meant she was probably up a floor or two tanning the hide of someone who would force her to leave her office.

Pity to them, she guessed.

Lucy pulled the door to the photo room open, motioning for her to follow. Kara, obliging, reached behind to pull the door shut behind her, watching as Lucy made her way up to James and pecked him on the lips, which he returned with a soft smile. She still felt that pang, but it wasn’t so hard on her. She felt ready, steadier.

James glanced up, met her eyes. He lifted an eyebrow, as though asking if this was when she was finally going to do it.

Kara glanced away, back to Lucy, and took a step forward, folding her hands behind her back. She took in a breath through her nose, half-shut her eyes, and then breathed out. Now or never. At least they were in a soundproof room, unlike her original ludicrous decision to _jump off a building_ to come out about her alien heritage to Winn. She had really gotten caught up in that moment, huh. “I’m Supergirl.”

Lucy froze, James winced like he hadn’t expected her to go straight at the problem like that. Maybe she wouldn’t’ve, in another world, maybe she wouldn’t’ve told Lucy at _all_ ; maybe she would’ve done nothing and let their relationship self-destruct because she couldn’t bring herself to trust the sister of Lois. Maybe her suspicions had some validity, maybe they didn’t, but she could only work with things now. That and Addy had proven sometimes being blunt was the easiest way to get to the heart of a problem.

“Your boyfriend has helped me out a lot to handle myself and figure out who I should be,” she said, without missing a beat. “I like to think I’m a good person, that I try, but sometimes I do get caught up with what happened. I released Maxwell Lord today from D.E.O. custody, despite my misgivings, because of him.”

James’ smile turned a bit more genuine, less forced.

“Why?” Lucy said at last, her voice reedy thin.

“Maxwell, or why _me_?” Kara replied, letting Addy’s chime keep her calm. She could do this. Addy was honest with her, and had been honest since she landed. She didn’t hide anything outside of what was necessary to keep herself safe.

“The second first, then the first second,” Lucy said slowly, the words tinged with anger. Not unexpected, Lois at family dinners hadn’t exactly been cordial about her sister, or her close relationship with their father. General Lane was a cruel, xenophobic man, and it reflected in the people he raised.

“At the beginning, it was to protect me,” Kara admitted, glancing towards the window. “I was only a kid when I arrived, you know? Thirteen, I watched my world die and my adoptive parents did _everything_ to make sure I would be safe here, that I wouldn’t have to run away from another planet. They tried so hard, and one of them died because of my negligence in hiding myself properly.”

She took in a breath, reminded herself of the importance. “Later, after that, it became to protect my peers. What do you think others would do if they knew, Lucy?” Kara couldn’t help the pleading in her tone, couldn’t help the simmer of hurt. “What do you think they’d do to my sister, my _mother_? What about Addy? I take care of her now, but if people knew? She’d be a constant target. I can’t protect everyone, no matter how hard I try, but I can keep those closest to me _safe_ so long as nobody knows my identity.”

It took a moment, but something in Lucy’s posture loosened, eased away. She breathed out, reaching up to press the palm of her hand into her own face, dragging fingers down. “The next one,” she said, voice edging on flat.

“Maxwell Lord created Bizarro,” Kara said simply. “He trafficked eight comatose Jane Doe girls, experimented heavily on them with DNA he cultured from me, and went on to give them nearly all of them non-consensual cosmetic surgery to look identical to me. Why do you think we put him away?”

Lucy glanced away, biting her lower lip. “Point,” she managed, sounding reluctant. “But, you two—then, you two had something going. It makes sense no—”

“Lucy,” Kara interrupted, not able to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “It would be incredibly cruel for your boyfriend to cheat on you emotionally or otherwise with me. I might’ve had a crush on him for a while, but I don’t think it was specifically like that. I didn’t want James, I wanted what _you guys_ have. You get to have a normal relationship, the last guy I kissed? I broke his nose accidentally because I got too excited, and that’s not a particularly new development either. I wanted what you guys had because I... I don’t think I ever can have it. I’d need to disclose my identity to anyone I date, I’d need to make it clear that one day _I might not come home to them_. I would need to overcome hurdles of my own biology to get even anything remotely similar to what you have.”

Lucy just looked at her, her expression open for the first time since they’d met. There was a long moment where Kara thought she’d turn away anyway, that the entire confession would be a failure, before something like... understanding slipped into place, settled over her features like a blanket, and she sighed.

“I’m sorry for hiding it from you,” Kara said gently.

Lucy smiled wanly. “It’s okay. I’m sorry about... _that_. I just, I need to reevaluate how I see you, okay? I, I won’t tell anyone, but, just, give me some space, alright?”

Kara breathed out, relief settling into her body. Things would be okay, none of this was going to ruin her life.

“Alright.”

* * *

“Finally moved on, have you?”

Jolting around, Kara relaxed as she saw Miss Grant approach, her strides long. She was in business casual today, wearing long dress pants, heels high enough to hurt, and a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In one hand was, from a glance, a signed letter of resignation, and in the other was a large cup of coffee, which she took a sip from.

“Sorry about this morning,” Kara said, instead. Because, to be honest, she didn’t really want to talk about James. Yes, she hurt _less_ than she had thought she would, but it didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt at all. She still felt that uncomfortable, squirming longing for what they had, but it was less directed at him and more of a general malaise towards couples in general. She’d probably have to get Alex to buy a few cartons of ice cream and introduce Addy to the idea of break-up movies, huh.

Miss Grant just clicked her tongue, passing her by and turning to enter her office. “Kiera, in.” Miss Grant commanded, closing the rest of the distance towards her desk as she placed her things down just next to her computer.

Obligingly, Kara entered.

“Close the door, Kiera, I shouldn’t have to tell you how to do _everything_.”

Again, she obliged, gently easing the glass door shut behind her. Standing with her hands tangled together in front of her, she met Miss Grant’s eyes from across the room. The woman rolled hers after a moment and casually motioned towards the chair with a huff.

Fighting back the smile tugging at her lips, Kara made her way to the chair on the opposite side of Miss Grant’s desk, sitting down after first pulling it out.

“I assume Addy is doing better, yes?” Miss Grant began, eyes still trained on her computer as she typed rapid-fire across the keyboard.

Kara tuned back into Addy again, picking up on the smooth, deep breathing. The tinkling was gone, sadly, but the breathing meant she was almost certainly asleep. “She bounced back very quickly.”

“Good,” Miss Grant said, before finally turning her focus solely on to her. “Now, to preface this conversation, if you tell a single soul what I’m about to tell you, I will have you fired and ruin your reputation so thoroughly you will be married to a job at Walmart. Clear?”

Kara swallowed, shifting backwards a bit. Still intimidating, Miss Grant. “Crystal.”

“I’d always known Carter was on the spectrum,” Miss Grant began without prelude, her voice firm. “Not as severe as some of the others, I’ll admit, but he had troubles. He didn’t respond to his name very well, he babbled a lot, he consistently avoided social environments and preferred to either be alone or be with me. He absolutely hated the texture of grass, to the point where he would get upset if he even so much as _saw_ it, and for nearly a year, he wore a _single_ hat and refused to take it off. I had to, at some points, bathe him with it on, and take it off while he slept to wash it.”

Kara remained quiet, soaking the information in. Miss Grant was rarely if ever open about Carter, but something had clearly changed, something important.

“His father was not... impressed with Carter,” Miss Grant said diplomatically, clearly trying to keep herself from saying something else. “But for the most part, I did not care. Carter was Carter, and regardless of how much it might _upset_ the father if he couldn’t traditionally pass as neurotypical, I did not care. I got him help, of course, insofar as I could. I did research, I - and you should too - avoided Autism Speaks, because that company is a voyeuristic exploration of how exploitative you can be. While I did not _mind_ that Carter did not live up to the expectations of what society considered _normal_ , I did everything in my power to make sure his life would be smooth so long as I walked this earth, and even well after.”

Miss Grant took a moment, reaching out to shakily take a sip of her cup. She swallowed, shut her eyes, and glanced towards the window, tapping her finger against the rim of the cup.

“Over time, Carter picked up on his peers' behaviour and found ways to appear more neurotypical, at least outwardly. His father was delighted, I didn’t mind either way, but I always, _always_ intended for my home to be a place where he could be himself. If he didn’t want red food tonight? We could have green. If he found, suddenly, that he could no longer stand the stripes of his room being horizontal? We could paint them vertical. I found out later that his father was _encouraging_ him to act neurotypical, admittedly, and now his father has visitation rights so strict and so legally-solid that if he so much as _breathed_ wrong I could tie the damn contract to his foot like a cinder block and chuck him into a lake, but... I still failed on that end.”

Another pause, Miss Grant visibly collected herself, returned to that haughty air of authority. Her chin raised, her lips pursed, her hands folded. “I’ll be clear, Kara. I structured a lot of the internal policies surrounding mental health days to best support autistic people working in my company. I am not ‘in the know’ when it comes to every mental health problem, I am _not_ a saint.” Miss Grant met her eyes, solid and firm. “But I am willing to say I did my best here, and will do my best for Addy as things come. I said before I wanted to keep our interpersonal relationship purely professional, after Adam I had been hurt, but I do consider you somewhat of a friend, or at least an _ally_. This is not because you’ve suddenly taken on an autistic woman, either, we are both well aware that despite her hangups Addy is more than capable of existing on her own, if not how either of us would consider reasonably acceptable.”

She wasn’t wrong. Addy was self-sufficient to a point, most of what Kara was providing her was a place to get settled and to have access to resources she might have to find alternatives to otherwise. Everything Addy did was in her own power, she was not a child, simply wired differently.

“I look at Addy and I see, hopefully, someone that Carter could look up to as an example of where he could go into the future. I’ll be honest, Addy has chosen a field of study that will try to eat her up and spit her out. The tech field is male-dominated and the women in it are generally beholden to their appearance. Addy is neither conventionally attractive nor ‘normal’ enough for them to get by on that alone, even putting aside the fact that she has a visible handicap.” She sounded bitter and harsh, like each word was a curse. “But I’m sure she’ll be able to work through things herself. I’ll be discussing it more directly with her later, but Addy is what I hope for the future of this company, of the world, Kara. You do not, and should not, have to feel that you or Addy cannot come to me with concerns or problems with her workplace. I won’t paint the walls with stripes, but I have people who can do something very similar, within reason.”

Kara breathed in, felt her chest fill with more burny warmth. “Thank you,” she murmured, trying to get the words out. “Is, uhm, there anything else?”

Miss Grant smiled, and it was a bit sad. “No, I just wanted to make it clear that our personal standing is no longer... where it was, after Adam. That and, at least for me, when I finally found someone who was there to support both myself and Carter, I felt better. Less like I was going to have to fight the world with my bare hands, which, I would. I would rip this entire male-dominated field down brick by brick if it meant Carter could walk through it without a problem. But I didn’t feel like I had to, and now I hope that you don’t either.”

Kara breathed out, felt the tension she hadn’t known was there leak out of her in waves. She smiled, bright and unabashed, and Miss Grant didn’t so much smile back as quirk her lips. It wasn’t the toothy smile she’d like to see out of Miss Grant one of these days, but it was enough.

Everything was going to be okay.

There were people there for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, hi there! another surprise. I updated early, again. Mostly because I'd like to get out another Handcuffed chapter and want to give myself a day or two to rest before doing so. I'll be trying to keep to Tues/Thurs from now on, no matter how early I finish these things.


	10. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes to work.

It had been a week since she had freed Kara.

Staring at herself in the fogged-up mirror, Addy tilted her head to one side. Her hair, as dry as it could be freshly showered, stuck to the skin of her forehead, still damp enough to cling. She maneuvered the toothbrush with her tongue, pressing it further into the side of her mouth and tried not to let the pungent taste of mint overwhelm her sensibilities.

She remembered to blink.

Was this what normalcy felt like? She wasn’t really sure. Taylor’s life had been normal in the abstract, at least for a portion of it. Her youth had been defined by a life among family, a mother, a father, a friend so close she could’ve been a sister—intimacy, freely given and received. But, then, everything after those moments had taken a decline into abnormality. The death of her mother, the negligence of her father, the sudden and violent betrayal of a friend, the accompanying abuse and bullying she faced as a social pariah.

Her only frame of reference for normal was from when Taylor was a _child_. What was normal to a child and an adult were two very different things, and not just because you had different responsibilities. Part of the unique appeal of humanity against, say, another nearby primitive species living in Alpha Centauri was that their children were so malleable. The world was viewed very differently as a child, more flexible, realities weren’t so absolute and the lens which they viewed the world from was slightly skewed. They made fascinating test cases for powers, showed a deep versatility when it came to the use of powers, and were more easily influenced, pushed towards certain ends, than those undergoing the later half of their maturation cycle.

But for all that it was interesting just how adaptive said children could be, it did not help her predicament.

Normal was, she knew, relative. Taylor had felt plenty normal in moments when she probably shouldn’t’ve. The days spent as a warlord, overseeing little communities full of people—that had felt normal to Taylor, despite the fact that she was sixteen, a high-profile criminal, and currently ruling in place of any overhead government.

This was no comparison for that, of course. Taylor had properly consolidated her resources, taken control, and ruled a chunk of US territory until a precognitive had forced her hand to change tracks. She, meanwhile, was living a life that she could imagine Taylor had wanted at some point in her life. She worked 9-to-5, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, as a junior IT tech under Winn Schott, learning her way around server maintenance and handling security threats. She had a completely normal life, she hadn’t even gone out again as Administrator, largely because Winn was demanding that he have time to put her new costume together to ensure she wouldn’t ‘leave rips and tears in the next one trying to get it off’.

It wasn’t _her_ fault that the costume couldn’t hold up to her super strength, but then she was pretty sure Winn was in agreement with her on that topic. He had been surprisingly understanding about her inability to wear it, had pointed out it was better now to establish boundaries and expectations than it was in the middle of an actual crisis, or when he actually got down to making her a real costume. That one had just been a loan, just enough to hide her identity from passing glances.

Reaching up, Addy got back to brushing her teeth. She wasn’t totally sure how to feel about the texture of brushing her teeth, honestly. On the one hand, it was fascinating to feel each bristle press against the deposits of calcium phosphate enclosing the more vulnerable living tissues that humans called ‘pulp’. Delightfully, humans did have some of the best teeth or forms of biological material processors she’d seen in a sapient species, though she still sometimes wished they had opted to evolve bird-like gizzards.

Half of the reason why she had become so interested in birds in the first place _was_ the gizzard. Organs to break down consumed materials weren’t uncommon, largely due to the inherently fragile nature of limbs such as throats, but it was certainly a rarity for a species to turn swallowed debris into a chewing method. Why everything on this planet outside of some insects and aquatic organisms had decided it was an intelligent idea to combine their breathing systems to the same hole they stuffed solid objects down was anybody’s guess, but they had to live with their poor decisions, and now so did she.

Gurgling, Addy spat out the remaining toothpaste into the sink, plopped her rainbow-coloured toothbrush back into the cup next to the sink, and quickly ran a quick diagnostic by running her tongue along the surface of her teeth. No chalky sensations, she’d probably have to brush again the _second_ she got home, but she was getting substantially better at doing daily hygiene tasks, which was definitely an improvement.

Staring at her hair mutinously, Addy began the most difficult part of her day: tying her hair back. She’d gotten into the habit mostly because she disliked hair in her face so much that Kara had offered to tie it back one day. She’d found that, aside from the slight tug against her scalp that she wasn’t particularly fond of, it was the most efficient way to wear her hair. She couldn’t rely on Kara for everything, however, so she’d started doing it herself.

Starting first by tucking her hair behind her shoulders, and then behind her ears, Addy widened her hand, briefly thanked Daniel and Annette Hebert for being predisposed towards large, if limber hands, and captured the majority of her hair in her grip. That had taken a while to get down, making sure you weren’t missing any single strand, but thankfully due to Taylor’s genetic predisposition towards almost ringlet-style curls, her hair had a habit of clustering together. Tightening her grip, she began to twist her hair, turning and turning until she could feel the wound-up hair against her scalp. Taking the now twisted clump of hair, she began wrapping it over itself, looping until she couldn’t anymore, and then finally tucked the tail end beneath one of the loops to keep it all together.

Bringing her wrist up to her mouth, Addy bit down on the top of her five yellow hair-ties - she was feeling very yellow today, after all - freed it from the bony expanse of her hand, and then quickly brought it up to her head, tucking it over the rough bun and folding it as well to tie it three times, leaving the bun tight and high on the back of her head and her vision mercifully clear of errant curls.

Tilting her head back and forth, she eyed her hair. It was fine, a suitable and commendable bun at the very top of her head, almost slicking her hair back from the tightness of it. It bore no small resemblance to some hairstyles Annette Hebert had worn in the past, though Taylor’s mother had been less messy about it. Still, she thought it looked presentable enough, and that’s all that really mattered at this point in time.

Yawning into the back of her hand - another odd and bewildering evolutionary decision - Addy dropped her eyes back down to the clothes she’d piled up on the lid of the toilet. She _was_ feeling yellow today, but also a bit red, so she’d decided to combine the two. She had her favourite pair of yellow pants, a collared red shirt that looked like something a golf player would wear, red-and-white shoes waiting for her near the door, and a thin yellow cocoon cardigan. Pairing colours like that wasn’t something she always did; sometimes she woke up and knew she had to reflect the blues, the yellows, the greens and even the reds, all at once, in one outfit, but today she was feeling yellow and red strongly enough to just go with them.

Reaching down, Addy plucked the shirt from the top of the pile.

She wondered if Cat Grant would like this outfit more than the other ones she’d been wearing.

* * *

“Kara.” Alex’s voice was thin, almost reedy, sounding both concerned and exasperated.

Addy peeked around the corner of Kara’s room - the only bathroom was the one connected to it, after all - and blinked. Alex was there, a pink box of donuts left open on one of the dining room tables, standing across from Kara, who had her arms folded firmly over her chest.

“I’m not coming back to the D.E.O. Alex,” she said, voice a little faint, but unwavering. “I can’t.”

Alex’s face fell and Kara turned away, taking a napkin off the table and using it to cleanly pluck one of the donuts. She turned, again, and Kara’s eyes met hers.

“Kara,” Alex repeated, again, remaining unaware of her presence. “Hank was only doing his duty, okay? Protecting the planet, just like you do every day.”

Addy watched as Kara’s face went stiff, went from uncomfortable to something harder, almost cold. “I don’t kill,” she said flatly, turning on her heel to stare at her sister.

Alex twitched. It wasn’t quite a flinch, but it was close. “Soldiers do,” she said, voice growing quiet. “When they have to, and Hank had to.”

Addy took a step forward, out from behind the curtain, and Alex jolted, eyes flicking up in a panic. They relaxed, settled once they met eyes, but there was still an undercurrent of tension there. Her presence was still new, she knew that; Alex wasn’t used to someone else coexisting in Kara’s space outside of her, but there was nothing either of them could do about it outside of relocating her, and that wasn’t really something they were considering.

Kara, meanwhile, passed right by Alex, walking over to the couch and dropping herself down. Addy noticed, somewhat belatedly, that she was still wearing her pyjamas, a soft-looking pair of pants and a shirt covered in black polka-dots. She brought the donut up to her mouth and took a bite, eyes staring resolutely at the floor as she chewed.

The room was quiet enough to hear Kara swallow.

“I had a chance to bring Astra back into the light,” she said without prompting, eyes still fixed on the floor. “And I was cheated out of that chance— _Astra_ was cheated out of that chance, Alex. I know I should be better than this, I know that Hank did what he thought was right, but I’m not sure if I can forgive him for that.”

Alex, still on her feet, started to pace. Addy could relate, the energy in her legs had started growing more frantic as the conversation had continued, ignoring her presence. She wanted to pace, wanted to say something, but the guilt stopped her. She knew the truth, knew that Hank hadn’t killed Astra, that Alex had. She had felt the feeling of flesh parting beneath a blade, watched Astra bleed out on a rooftop in a panic, but those hadn’t been her experiences. Those had been Alex’s.

She also knew that it would have to be Alex who had to tell Kara. If Addy did, in their current relationship, it would ruin them. It would not be a thing Alex was confessing her guilt about, it would be a lie, something that Alex had hidden, had possibly intended to keep hidden for the rest of their lives. She understood that nuance enough, she could empathize with it to a point too, but this was getting... excessive.

In a week, Alex had only been over twice, once for game night, and once for this. She needed to come clean, it was all but eating her inside out. She breathed in, took another step out from Kara’s room and towards the kitchen, ignoring the way Alex paused to track her motion with her eyes. The atmosphere was stilted, awkward, she normally couldn’t pick up on it, but it was bad enough now that she could. Everyone knew that she had heard, everyone knew that she knew what they were discussing, but nobody wanted to confront it.

Even if they needed to.

Ignoring the donuts, Addy tugged her bag - with her laptop safely ensconced, it had become part of her morning routine to unplug it and tuck it away in her bag along with her wallet - up from the table and coaxed it over the cardigan she was wearing. “I’m going to work,” she announced, breaking the silence.

She watched Kara’s head snap up, glimpsing the clock. “Shit,” she blurted, blurring to her feet in an act of super speed that Addy wasn’t totally sure she could replicate. She had tried a few times, she just hadn’t managed to enter that state - whatever it was - that Kara had described. “I need to get to work, sorry Alex, we can talk about this later.”

“Kara—” Alex began, only to be cut off as Kara’s figure blurred again, vanishing into the depths of her room.

Addy met Alex’s eyes for a moment, considered bringing it up now, but then tossed it aside. Unlike Kara, she did not use her powers so wastefully for menial tasks and had been expressly forbidden from potentially compromising her identity by flying to work, so she would have to walk, and if she wanted to get to work on time, she’d probably have to walk pretty fast.

“Bye,” she said in place of anything else better to say, briefly pausing to check that her keys were still in her bag.

“Have a good day, Addy,” Alex called out, though her voice didn’t sound very genuine.

She pulled the door shut behind her as she left.

* * *

Harvesting the radiation produced by stellar forces had been among the gestalt’s main methods of power acquisition. Not to say it was their most _productive_ method, starlight and light from closer stars made up less than a quarter of the energy they gathered during transit despite the fact that they were constantly focusing on gathering it. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a lot of energy there, no, the gestalt had very efficient cells for capturing photons and converting them into numerous forms of energy to better fuel the greater whole, but in the end they had actually gathered a majority of their energy through the harvest of planetary bodies.

So she hadn’t really thought about her powers in great detail as a result. It was easy to just accept that stellar radiation worked for her, despite the inconsistencies with the colour of suns. She’d already started to put a picture together in her head of a universe with slanted logic, logic she would have to learn, but even this was a bit much.

The first thing was that this body, with its altered DNA, was as efficient as the gestalt had been in its transit form in acquiring and storing solar energy. Which made no sense, as it would happen, because the gestalt had been made out of a tight matrix of incredibly specific crystalline composition that had been chosen for the sole purpose of energy storage and discharge as necessary. Yes, her species had been so efficient at capturing sunlight for use in its basic biological functions that it could power the world with only a scant few solar arrays, but no, that did not mean being biological and having nearly equal capabilities made any sense whatsoever.

Second, even if that _was_ the case, it still shouldn’t be enough for the casual displays of energy usage that Kara showed off. Her eye beams were the main thing, they should’ve drained her dry in an instant, and yet she could use them with enough frequency that reheating her boss’s coffee cup wasn’t a risk to her continued wellbeing. Kara probably didn’t realize it herself, despite seeming plenty smart she didn’t really care much for the conversation of science, but she was working on energy levels well beyond what human civilization had access to _now_. Lasers like that weren’t cheap.

If Kara had been working on a scale humans could only imagine, then the gestalt had been working on energy levels so vast humans could only barely muster rough ideas of how things had worked. Her coreself worked on levels somewhere between Kara and the gestalt, not quite to the point where processing stars was necessary, but close enough that, upon being deployed in her barren dimension to seed an alternative earth, she had harvested a quarter of the moon for the extra material.

That had been, to her, a simple decision. An orbiting satellite was not important, and she had needed it to bulk up her total mass to ensure she could root herself deep into the barren Earth’s mantle and access the wealth of thermal energy any tectonically active planet had, but with new context that idea would’ve been absurd. Putting aside what destroying the moon would do to tides - nothing good - the concept of just... _consuming_ a planet like that, something just vanishing from the night sky—it would be hard for humans to process.

It was almost hard for _her_ to process, now that she had the context and cultural significance of the moon.

“Are you giving me the silent treatment because I asked that question?” Winn asked, his voice weak.

Addy glanced up at him, stared at him from over the back-to-back monitors on each of their desks. “I am not upset,” she said slowly, flexing her fingers again, watching the light play over each digit. She was getting too much energy from it, she was gaining more energy than was altogether possible from the sun. It didn’t make sense. This _universe_ didn’t make any sense, she was missing something important.

“I am really sorry about that,” Winn babbled on, pitching his voice a bit low, presumably for privacy. “I—look, I shouldn't have asked if Kryptonians technically qualified as plants, alright? I’m sorry Addy.”

“It’s not your fault,” she replied. It wasn’t, it really, really wasn’t. Things weren’t making sense, she kept going over the math, her body was too efficient for something biological, took in more energy than it should. There was something else working in the background, something that was so good at converting the raw energy she could access from the radiation of a yellow sun that it eclipsed what should be possible. “You have just made me realize that things are different here.”

 _She_ was different. But then she’d already gotten used to that concept, had since stopped thinking of herself as Queen Administrator, and more as something that had forked from her, branched off like an errant bud. She hadn’t really had the chance to properly bud in the cycle, Taylor had reached crisis points twice in rapid succession during their connection event, resulting in the resources being fully consolidated into her. She had, somewhat arbitrarily, budded to an _extent_ , but budding was so often a mixed science. She had budded in the absolute literal sense of the word, had used resources to craft a secondary minor hub to host a second instance of power to give to Aiden, but it hadn’t been budding as others had. Buds were so often independent actors on their own, it was encouraged to combine traits between shards shared among close relatives, to construct new instances of life to then bring the data back to see if it could be used to further the cycle.

But she hadn’t. She had consolidated her resources completely in Taylor, had only done the bare minimum to ensure she could have a second instance of her power active. She had not created a new instance of herself, but now she _was_ a new instance, separate and independent and unique in all the ways she shouldn’t be.

Everything was different. She was no exception.

She wasn’t sure what to do with any of that outside of accepting that it existed and try to work through it.

“You just look a little upset,” Winn tried, sounding timid.

Addy blinked, felt for the expression she had on her face. She tried to quirk her lips up, but didn’t quite manage it. “I am not upset.” She didn’t want to be, so therefore she wasn’t.

“Addy,” Winn said, voice almost chastising. “It’s okay to feel a bit... out of touch.”

“Do you have access to resources which detail the exact logic the universe works under?” Addy changed tracks, not wanting to even begin with that conversation. “I would like to look them over in detail. I need to know if I need to correct an assumption.”

Winn opened his mouth—

“Important people!” Cat Grant yelled out, a snap to her voice, strutting confidently from the elevator and towards her office. “Yes, that includes you, cardigan hobbit, and you, Addy. We’re having a staff meaning. Stat, with a capital _S_.”

—and then shut it.

Addy rose from her seat with perhaps what might be considered an unreasonable amount of quickness, if the way Winn squinted at her was any indication, but she valiantly ignored his judgement. She was, to whatever ends, above his judgement in everything but the duties of this job, which she was excellent at. Rote memorization and an innate understanding of synthetic logic were hardly difficult skills to master, and after that it was just iterations on the same thing, sometimes with different ways of saying specific things.

Kara, James and Lucy were already making their way over, Kara at the front with her hands folded politely in front of her. Addy had come to call that composition of submissive body posture and endlessly cheerful smile the ‘Cat Grant’ composition. Kara only ever wore it for one person, and Addy still wasn’t sure if it was because she valued Cat Grant to the point where she felt it was necessary, if it was because Cat Grant would chastise her for acting any differently, or some morbid combination of the two.

There were other faces making their way in, too. Not many that Addy could put a name to, though, and the group totalled to about nine, not including herself and Winn, the latter of which was keeping pace behind her, pointedly quiet.

“My massage therapist,” Cat began, taking an outstretched glass of water from one of the people Addy had yet to bother to learn the name of. “Spent the entire session talking about how her surrogate has celiac disease, and my pilates instructor informed me he’s quitting to open up an artisanal yarn store in Vermont.” She plopped her bag down, plucked the sunglasses from her face, and planted either of her hands on the desk in front of her, leaning forward. “So, which one of you hardy souls is going to give me a reason to go on living?”

Addy was almost certain everything she’d just said was thick with sarcasm, but it was still hard to parse. She spared a furtive - and somewhat lost - glance towards Kara, who just smiled back at her reassuringly. So, probably sarcasm. Cat Grant was not suicidal, which was good, because despite it all Cat Grant had been one of the better people she had the pleasure of meeting.

Cat glanced forward, motioning vaguely into the crowd. “You?”

An Indian man stepped forward, his black hair cut short and fuzzy against his scalp. “The National Men’s Chorus is organizing a Lego drive and—”

Cat rolled her eyes. That or looked up at the ceiling in what Addy was beginning to understand was an attempted prayer towards one of the planet’s various religious figures. “And I’m comatose,” she said scathingly, glancing back towards the crowd. “Fashion. _Speak_.”

A woman with long, shoulder-length ginger hair and a delightfully blue dress glanced down at the folder she had, quickly skimming over it. “We’re seeing crushed velvet as an important look this fall,” she said, sounding rather pleased with herself. Addy would be in agreement, crushed velvet - despite never seeing it before, she’d look it up over lunch - sounded wonderful.

“ _Oh_ ,” Cat drawled, eyes cast towards the window in a show of dismissal. “Try crushed _dreams_. Anyone else?”

Kara stepped forward this time, and the palpable breath of relief was not so much audible as it was something Addy noticed. People relaxed, figures grew laxer, people looked less like they were looking for exits to flee out of. She should learn how Kara achieved that, seeing as Taylor only ever caused the opposite. “Miss Grant, you had a package delivered to you by a private courier,” she explained, handing over the package with its flap already opened.

Cat took it, reaching inside to retrieve a thumb-drive and a crinkled, folded letter. Her lips pursed as she set the thumb drive down and unfolded the piece of paper, leaning back in a show of not shock, but almost _mocking_ , like something on the page was funny in a particularly humiliating way. “Make the liars pay for their lies,” she read, her tone trying at a sarcastic doom-and-gloom sort of voice. “Make the cheaters feel the pain of their betrayal.” The last few words were spat out, thick with loathing. She even brought the entire thing together with a little dramatic shake of her shoulders.

Cat could be so wonderfully expressive, Addy had come to learn.

“That’s from the website Diamond Digressions dot com,” Lucy cut in, sounding almost hesitant.

James stepped forward next, bumping shoulders with Lucy in a show of support. “It’s like Ashley Madison, but this one was supposed to be unhackable.”

“It was attacked last night by an anonymous hacker,” Lucy eased back in, sending a warm smile towards James. “They left that exact text up on the main page, but none of the data they took has been released otherwise.”

“Because the hacker wanted it reported by a major media outlet,” Cat pointed out, just as easily, sounding unimpressed. “So they sent it to me.”

Cat turned to Kara, who stepped forward.

“Kiera,” she said, throwing the thumb-drive underhand right at her. “Put it in the microwave, set it to popcorn.” She paused, lidding her eyes and tilting her head to one side contemplatively. “Well, actually, put it to baked potato. Or whichever, just... _melt it._ ” The last two words came out derisive, the sort of tone you’d use when commenting on the gum stuck to your boot.

Kara turned wordlessly, and about half of the room did with her.

“Cat,” Lucy interrupted, and everyone in the room froze. “That website caters to powerful people; elected officials, public figures—spouse immorality they, themselves, ignore. They’re hypocrites, liars; the public has a right to know the truth.” Her voice was impassioned, but not loud or upset. That was one of the things she liked about Lucy over Kara’s other friends, despite the fact that they had only met a few times, and mostly only at work, she was almost always unflappable.

Cat threw her head back, breathing out a disgruntled groan. After a moment, she corrected herself, staring Lucy down from across her desk. “ _Lucy_ , we live in a brave new world of gay marriage and transgender republicans, nobody bats an _eye_ at that stuff anymore. Also, I’ve been on the other side, and if we publish these names we give those disgusting bottom-feeders legitimacy, and therefore, _Major Lane_ , the terrorists will have won.”

It was fascinating to watch as Lucy’s face pinched into an expression like she was trying _really_ hard not to air her grievances. Loudly. Possibly at the expense of her job and any reputation she might have built up among her coworkers. Turning, the rest of the office began to move with her, including Kara, who was making a bee-line towards the staff room, where Addy vaguely remembered there being a microwave.

She turned as well.

“Addy, stay. Winnslow”—her pseudo-boss in question jumped, glancing warily at Cat—“go and ensure none of this was a cover for some other type of cyber threat. I’ll give you your protege back in a moment.”

Winn nodded rapidly, scurrying towards the door.

“And shut the door, Winnifred!”

He did.

“Addy,” Cat said, her voice returning to something more smooth and warm, unlike the way she’d been talking since she first arrived. “Please take a seat.”

One of her—Taylor’s errant memories flickered to the forefront of her mind. A principal’s office, unspoken kindness turning out to be, in truth, a punishment. She swallowed down at the odd feeling in her chest. “Am I in trouble?”

Cat smiled. “No, you’re not. I think we just need to have a discussion. You’re not in any trouble at all, this is just a necessary conversation we will have to have soon, and I would prefer we do it now before I have to go and send Kara out to replace the microwave she’s about to ruin.”

Addy tread over carefully, glimpsing down at her yellow laces - she had replaced her blue-and-purple ones this morning with these to better match her mood - as she went. Eventually, she eased herself around the corner of one of Cat’s comfy chairs and gently lowered herself down into it, leaning against her elbow but letting her hand tap soft rhythms into the middle of her thigh. It was soothing.

The knot of tension released in her chest, and she breathed out. Cat was safe. She was safe. She wasn’t in trouble.

“I wanted to ask, for starters, if you have dealt with any harassment whatsoever,” Cat began, pausing to take another sip from her drink. “I’m not sure if you read the exact policy written into every contract in terms of how you conduct yourself”—she had, she’d read it over four times just to be sure—“but we have a zero-strike policy on discrimination against someone for any number of reasons, including disability, both mental and physical.”

Addy thought back for a moment. She didn’t really pay attention to people outside of Kara’s circle, mostly because they’d never felt that... _relevant?_ For lack of a better word. There were a few exceptions—Joseph Castillo was the nice man in office 4E who regularly offered her cookies, Patricia Strickland was another one of the office workers and she always complimented her on her clothes—but outside of the exceptions, she’d never really bothered to engage much with anyone beyond that, or pay any real attention to them either.

She didn’t really think she had to, either.

“If they have,” Addy started. “I have yet to overhear it, or feel like they thought less of me.”

Cat smiled, and it was genuine. “I am so glad I made an example out of the ones who thought otherwise,” she said, sounding almost wistful. “But that’s good. You’ve had no problem with operating anything with one arm?”

Addy shook her head. “The keyboard is a bit cumbersome, however that is something I will simply have to cope with.” Mostly because the alternatives she and Winn had looked up when she brought up her frustrations with the keyboard had all looked unpleasant. “Other than that, I have not faced any problems.”

Cat leaned back in her chair, breathing out in what Addy had learned was relief. “Right, and here is where we discuss the harder part. I am going to be making this as verbally vague as I can without implying anything about your mental state, however know everything I am telling you is something you are absolutely entitled to, but I am keeping my language specifically vague because my legal team cautioned against being blunt. Okay?”

Addy nodded.

“I built this company, in large part, to suit my own vision of what a multimedia company should provide. As a result, we have several options in place for people with difficulties operating in certain environments. You, Adeline, are entitled to an additional week and a half of paid time off in the event of an emotional or physical emergency. You are entitled to bring up concerns about the workplace which could impede you and others who also share disabilities similar to you. You are _encouraged_ to report anyone who uses any disabilities you have or _appear to have_ as a way to insult or deride you.” Cat took another drink, breaking up the sound of her voice. “If you need accommodations for yourself, such as specific work environments, you are entitled to them, and as a company we will do our best to support them. For example, how do you feel working in the main area?”

Addy blinked, rolled the thoughts around in her head for a moment. “It’s loud,” she admitted. “Winn said I would adapt to it, but it is loud and sometimes disruptive. I would prefer to stay there, if at all possible, because seeing Kara around can help me be calm, but yes it is very loud.”

Cat smiled with something like pride, though to who it was directed at, Addy wasn’t sure. “Using that example, if someone had similar experiences and it impeded their workflow due to a known issue, say, ADHD, we would accommodate their need for a quieter space. It might be on a different floor, or it might not be, it all depends on the exact needs for any one person. Though, if you don’t mind, a recommendation?”

She didn’t. Cat was being nice, very nice, warm and nice like Kara was. It felt weird, Cat was such a polarizing person, she was very different on television to how she was in person, let alone this version of her. “I don’t,” she said, glimpsing down at her fingers again. She liked this Cat, but then she wasn’t sure if this was the real Cat. She hoped so.

“Headphones are a wondrous invention,” Cat began. “And as a company, unless you are using them to ignore your superiors or, more importantly, myself, we have a blanket allowance on using them so long as you show they’re not a distraction. You could buy a pair and use your phone to listen to things you enjoy.”

That didn’t... “I don’t have a phone.”

Cat froze, glass almost to her lips. “You don’t,” she said dubiously.

Addy shook her head. “I don’t need one.” That and the ones she remembered from Taylor’s memories, while advanced, hadn’t really seemed particularly good at being anything more than a phone with some limited access to the internet. Even then, the internet had often looked very weird, with scrolling issues and things too large distorting websites.

“You’re a junior IT tech, you work for a multi—” Cat cut herself off, took another drink, and glanced vacantly at her own hand. “I am a fifty-year-old woman lecturing a twenty-one-year-old woman on technology. That is certainly a surreal experience.”

“I’m sorry?”

Cat flashed her another smile, though this one was a bit more like a smirk. “If you are, I think you might benefit from getting a cellphone. You won’t have to use it if you don’t need to, but even if you don’t use it for music, it might be helpful.”

Yes, but buying one would mean going out, looking at phones, avoiding the ones Kara says to, getting a contract, agreeing to monthly payments. Commitments. “I will try,” she said, instead.

“And if you can’t bring yourself to buy a phone,” Cat said gently, her features smoothing over. “You can always splurge on one of those iPods or whatever. Or, well, don’t buy anything from Apple, it’s overpriced shlock. Or do, I’m not your mother.”

Something about how she said that last comment felt oddly vulnerable, but Addy didn’t comment on it. “Thank you,” she said instead.

Cat reached down with her free hand, retrieving a small packet of papers. She dropped them down at the end of her desk, motioning vaguely towards them with her cup. “This goes over the exact things you’re entitled to as an employee of CatCo media with special needs, and not in the way schools use it. You have needs, they are special ones because other people might not need them, or wouldn’t need them as much, and they are, in every way, acceptable. Take these and you’re free to go.”

Addy reached over, prying her elbow from where she’d been pressing it into the chair, and pinched the packet between her fingers, hauling the thing into her lap.

The glass door behind her swung open abruptly. “Miss Grant!” Kara said, almost sounding like a wail. There was _actual_ panic in her voice. “I am _so_ sorry but the microwave—it uh—uhm.”

“Exploded?” Cat supplied, smug like a goose with a knife.

She could hear Kara deflate, probably hunching over into a slump. She really should know how bad that was for her back. “Yes,” she meekly confirmed.

“Go to Best Buy, Kiera, and don’t come back until you have the exact model of that microwave.”

Kara muffled a groan, though Addy still heard it.

“Yes, Miss Grant.”

* * *

Addy watched as Winn stretched, his arms pulled up high over his head. He yawned, mouth stretched wide, and a series of cracks echoed from where he’d laced his fingers together. “God,” he muttered. “Today was a _day_.”

Glancing back down at her screen, she idly compiled her code again. For reasons beyond her understanding, Winn had decided that today was the best day to teach her Javascript. Taylor had disliked the Earth Bet incarnation of it, and somehow this version of it was both worse and more clunky. It felt a generation out of date, and it probably was, now that she thought about it.

She spotted Lucy and James out of the corner of her eye, both of them wearing their jackets with shoulders pressed together. They looked happy, well and truly, though Lucy moved with no small amount of reluctance, like she was nervous about something. She pulled entirely away from her monitor, glancing as the two of them made their way over to Kara’s desk, Lucy plopping a brown bag down in front of her.

Kara’s face lit up, and she said something Addy couldn’t pick up. Lucy responded with something in turn, her shoulders hunching, just from what she could see her face was sombre. Kara, instead of doing as Addy expected - rip into the brown bag full of what was likely take out food - got to her feet and wrapped Lucy up in a hug.

A few seconds later, the other woman tentatively returned it.

“So the peace offering worked,” Winn commented. Addy glanced over to him, and he stared back at her, pursing his lips. “Lucy and Kara have been going through a bit of a rough patch due to _secrets_ ”—what exactly that was, she didn’t know, but the stress on the word meant it was probably important—“and uh, she came asking what she could give as a peace offering and an apology. I’m glad it worked out, it was really nerve-wracking to watch Miss Grant’s legal head butt heads with her long-term assistant, especially considering nobody before Kara’s two years of service had survived for longer than a few months.”

Addy nodded resolutely. That made sense, not just the bit about peace offerings, but also the bit about Kara enduring what others could not. Kara was strong, in more ways than just the physical, and it would make sense that she could be helpful to someone like Cat when nobody else could.

She glanced back towards the woman in question just in time to see all of the wall-mounted screens behind her chair turn to static. A low, painful crackle roared through the office as other screens, some on other walls, seemed to catch the static of ones near to them. It spread, jumping even to a few computers, before the static jolted and was replaced by the image of a woman. She was blonde, with lips painted the colour of blood, wearing a low-cut dress. All of the screens only captured everything chest-up, so she couldn’t see the rest of it, but the woman didn’t particularly seem to care.

“Greetings, CatCo employees,” she announced, sounding almost amused. “I’m disappointed in all of you.”

Winn rose to his feet, and Addy followed his example, as did the remaining people at the office. Cat strode, confident but looking somewhat uneasy, out of her office, glancing up at where they normally displayed the stock prices, which was now host to the woman’s image.

“‘Specially you, _Queen of all Media_.” The last few words, almost like Cat did, spat out with something like derision. This, though, didn’t feel like Cat’s snide mocking, it felt... imperious. Unpleasant.

“I suppose you’re the hacker who sent the drive this morning, hm?” Cat Grant, pretty uselessly, said. Because it wasn’t like there were microphones. “What do they call you, the peroxide avenger?”

Like she couldn’t hear her, which, again, she couldn’t, the woman on the monitor continued regardless. “I sent you the story of the year; how sinners have turned the internet into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, but, _ah_ , you failed to act.”

Cat shared a glance with Kara, face scrunched up like she was receiving secondhand embarrassment.

“So now, all will suffer,” she announced, her face splitting into a broad, cruel smile. “Computers control everything: communication, banking... even _traffic signals_. The age of chaos begins now.”

Kara was already slipping away, her face twisted into something panicked. Lucy leaned over, pressed her hand into her back, and gave a gentle, encouraging shove.

Addy glanced back up.

“Enjoy,” the woman breathed, sounding euphoric, and then the image cut.

Kara was gone when she next looked around for her.

“Toyman Jr.,” Cat said, eyes still trained on the now inert screens. “You’re the computer expert, _fix this_.”

Addy stared at Winn, whose eyes tracked over to her slowly. “Toyman?” She asked.

“I definitely liked it better when she did not know who I was,” he muttered, before his face cramped in realization, eyes flicking directly over to her own. “Please, just, don’t ask.”

“I already did,” Addy said, eyes crawling away from him. Keeping eye contact felt uncomfortable, so she didn’t.

“Don’t ask any _more_ ,” he clarified, rushing back to his desk in a flurry of movement. He sidled into his chair and, now that she could see his screen, almost instantly pulled up a window that looked an awful lot like the traffic grid.

Addy blinked. “Are you supposed to have access to your city’s traffic grid?” She asked.

The mixture of reds, yellows and greens all began to rapidly switch entirely to green. “I plead the fifth, that or the fact that it’s _kinda important considering she turned every light green!_ ”

Green means go. Which meant that people had no traffic signals, which meant people were hurtling around in the incredibly resource-inefficient mode of transport they’d decided on. She was not a fan of cars, busses and trains, though, they were fine. Cars were just incredibly bad.

James passed by her, smelling thick of woodsmoke, Lucy with him.

The screens around them flicked on again, the sound of crushing metal, of cars hitting cars, slamming into her ears. Addy couldn’t help the whine that left her, reaching up with her arm to press against her ear. It was loud, loud and with a lot of noises she hated. Her eyes flicked between them, she watched a van crush a smart car like a tin-can, an eighteen-wheeler drive completely over someone’s luxury car, all made out of swooping angles.

“Winn?”

The man in question glanced back at her, and whatever he saw he _understood_. “Addy, it’s not ready,” he said, ignoring Lucy’s odd look between them. James placed a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, shook his head slowly, and Lucy conceded with a tilt of her head, though the suspicion never left her face. “That and you can help me, this cyberattack isn’t going to get any better. Do you still have the programs I sent you?”

Tuning out the sound of crunching metal, Lucy’s muttered “oh my god” in response to something on a screen she was valiantly not going to look at, Addy nodded and made her way back to her desk. She pulled up the folder titled ‘Winnsentials’ and stared into the 90GB-dense folder he’d bequeathed to her after she’d roughly figured out ruby.

“Okay, so, I need you to go to the folder named ‘Seshat’. In it is a program named ‘Palermo’, run it as administrator.”

She did both, and a window popped up, showing what she was almost positive as a mirror of what was currently on Winn’s screen. Huh.

“I’m going to walk you through the rest of this too, but, random question, how good are you at multitasking?”

Addy breathed out, reached out to her power. She tied the bandwidth down to the point where it wasn’t even drawing on power, and instead amplified the secondary benefits her power offered, offloading some of her mental processing onto her coreself. She could feel the world begin to take that too-clear focus that came with turning that part of her power up, the concurrent awareness of multiple things that would’ve otherwise slipped out of her fingers. The world stopped being so noisy, started focusing down like a needle. She could breathe again, but it felt like she should have multiple sets of lungs to breathe better, more efficiently.

She checked her energy reserves. She could keep up five hours of this concurrently.

“I’m good enough at it,” she said, already opening two other windows of the folder and rapidly paging through each folder.

Winn made a noise. “Yeah, I can see that—oh! Open that file called ‘MoonBuddy’ and, well, get ready to help me do something, well, technically illegal.”

Lucy made a noise. “I didn’t hear that.”

Winn glanced away to stare up at her, confused for the few seconds it took for him to process she was still present. “Right! Something, uh, _totally legal?_ ”

Lucy nodded.

“Right, this is totally legal. Now open it, ignore the weird console spam in the background, it’s not sketchy, it’s just efficient.”

Addy did as he asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, my impulse control slipped. Here's chapter 8 almost 8 hours early. I had a lot of fun writing this, but in part due to my own pacing and the pacing of the show, this is more build-up and interaction than anything else, with hints at things going on in the background.
> 
> But, yeah, anyway! I hope you enjoyed.


	11. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To forestall any comments on it, all of the technobabble in this chapter is from the show itself.

She felt buzzy. There wasn’t any other word for it; the sensation was like bees under her skin, a low thrum of activity that was nearly impossible to ignore. She felt at the same time sluggish and too focused, her brain was clearly displaying slower processing power and was prone to mistaking one thing for another, or for sending her on a mental tangent, but at the same time it felt too quick. The thoughts came before she thought them, filling up the space usually reserved for basic tasks.

Blinking drowsily out the window, Addy cupped the warm mug closer to her chest, inhaling the smell of coffee. She wasn’t going to drink it, but the smell _was_ very nice. Something about the roasted quality to it was enjoyable, the stomach-deep warmth it gave off. Maybe it was due to lingering conditioning from Taylor’s memories—she might not have started out an avid coffee drinker, but by the time six months had passed in the Wards she had quickly fallen prey to the most liberally-abused addictive substances on the planet.

She still thought the drink tasted like dirt and was genuinely confused as to what people got out of it that they couldn’t get out of caffeine pills, but the smell was nice.

“So,” Kara’s voice beckoned, drew her gaze back from the window overlooking the vast city below and towards her. She was pacing back and forth, a furrow to her brow, her clothes sloppily thrown over the Supergirl costume she wore beneath it. They were in the so-called “Superfriends” room of CatCo HQ, a small little office out of the way that had been abandoned to the task of hosting dusty file cabinets. “What do we know about the hacker?”

Winn, across the room from her, with his laptop balanced on top of his legs, shrugged. “Well, for starters, I’m pretty sure this is either an alien or someone with international connections so deep it should be obvious who it is.” He hadn’t slept either, none of them had—not Kara, who had spent the night desperately playing catch-up with all the crashes that had occurred, not herself either - she’d spent most of the night aiding Winn in reverting seemingly random changes the hacker kept making to various important resources - nor even Winn, who had claimed he was going to take a nap sometime around 3:41AM and had promptly not done that.

They were all tired, all out of their depth, and it was only seven o’clock in the morning.

“...and it’s just, hacking doesn’t _work_ this way, you know?!” Winn’s voice picked up as she tuned back into it, his hands thrown wildly in front of him in a rough gesture of exasperation. “We’re not like, _hack the planet_ , or something. You gotta understand, either she’s using tech which just outright works _around_ our type of tech, or, I don’t know, maybe we should start looking for billionaires with a history in the tech industry and hope one of them is the person with access to all of this? I mean, _seriously_ , she hit the National City traffic grid, somehow overwrote all the programming used to stop someone from turning all the lights green, she’s crashed half of the American stock market and now she’s... I don’t know, seemingly taking out her frustrations on Google?”

Addy glanced back towards her laptop, which was perched on one of the tables they’d dragged into the room. True to his word, a feed designed by Winn to scrape relevant information from the internet and display it was, in fact, showing that the hacker had set her sights on the Google homepage now. People were, obviously, rather upset about this, and confused, because it was one thing to hack a dating site for cheaters, it was another to hit Google.

Taking in another deep inhale of coffee fumes, Addy hummed.

“So, either an alien or someone who probably can’t just be _forced_ to stop,” Kara echoed, her pacing picking up. “That’s... _bad_.”

Winn made a noise, dry and sarcastic. “No kidding?”

Kara shot him a _look_ , frustration wrinkling the space between her brows. “I don’t think you get it,” she said, sounding almost overwhelmed. “If it’s a tech person, it’s one thing, that means this stuff is human technology and we have human experts to handle it. If it isn’t, I mean, there are _so many_ different types of aliens who are primarily known for their technology. We can’t cover for all of them, it’s literally impossible, and on the off chance we do end up finding out it’s, say, an Appelaxian, who here can say with confidence they can figure out their coding systems? The methods they’re using to step around protections?”

Winn’s hand slowly raised.

Kara glared at him.

His hand remained upright if a bit shaky.

Addy took in another inhale of coffee scent, focused on the warmth from where her palm pressed against the sides of the mug. Her eyes were heavy, but she didn’t feel tired, not mentally, anyway. It was an odd experience, to be physically exhausted while her brain tried - and failed - to run a mile a minute. She wasn’t sure if she liked it or not, but she was starting to understand why people preferred not to have 48-hour sleeping cycles, despite it likely being more productive.

“Maybe we should go to the D.E.O.,” Winn tried slowly, raising up a hand to stall whatever Kara was about to say, her mouth shutting with a click. “This is just, I don’t have the _resources_ for this. Or, at least, I can’t access them while still doing my job, which, uhm, has become infinitely more difficult because we have a hacker who doesn’t seem particularly bothered by security systems.”

Kara stopped pacing, her jaw firming up as her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides. “I _can’t_ , Winn,” she said, voice wobbly. “I can’t do that, I’m sorry—it’s just, I can’t.”

Something in Winn’s face softened, his head tilting back to rest against the back of the couch, eyes trained at the ceiling. “It’s okay,” he said after a long moment of silence. “We’re the Superfriends, you know? We’ll figure this out.”

Silence settled back into place, accompanied by the steady clickety-clack of Winn’s absurd typing speed. Addy, by virtue of missing one arm, was restricted to a slower speed, though she was pretty sure she was typing faster than the average with only one hand at this point. Not that she was doing so now, she had her only hand occupied by a mug of boiling stimulant that she was using primarily to enjoy the scent, but she was proud of how far she’d come. There were so many redundancies with how people typed; why didn’t they use the pinky with more frequency? Why not just memorize the exact layout of your keyboard and use one hand to perfectly tap each key as needed? It was simple.

“Actually, speaking of, aren’t you on duty today?” Winn piped up, glancing away from the screen of his computer. “I know Addy’s got the day off, but, uh, are you sure you want to greet Cat in... thirty minutes in the same clothes you wore yesterday?”

Glancing towards Kara’s face, she had the pleasure of watching it drain of all colour somehow. It was a very impressive feat, especially with the inclusion of her pupils shrinking into pin-pricks and her entire body going ramrod stiff. Very expressive, she approved.

“Oh god.”

Winn’s face scrunched. “Kara, it’s okay, you have time—”

“ _Oh my god_ , Miss Grant is going to kill me,” Kara blurted, panic overcoming her still features as she dragged both hands up to grip at her own hair.

“Kara,” Addy cut in. “You can shower and change within a five-minute timeframe and be back with enough time to appear as though you went home.”

Kara stared at her blankly, and Addy could almost see the neurons firing in her brain, the connections being formed.

“Oh,” Kara breathed dumbly. “I can do that, right.” After another moment, she glanced towards the window she’d been leaving open for an easy place to land after saving people from lethal vehicular accidents. “I am going to do that,” she said woodenly. “I’ll be back soon.”

True to her word, she was off again, leaving behind a small bundle of her old clothes, the red-and-blue streak flashing out through the window at speeds high enough to make it hard to track.

Addy inhaled again, hummed happily.

“Do you think we should be worried about a sleep-deprived Kryptonian?” Winn asked belatedly, his head tilted to one side, a bit like that one picture of a confused dog she’d seen this morning.

There was another long moment of silence, the faint sound of wind whistling against the side of the building almost lulling her eyes shut again. No, bad, that was her body betraying her. It would listen to _her_ , no matter how comfortable it felt to let her eyes droop. They would remain open until further notice, she was in control.

“ _Nah,_ ” Winn broke in, his voice dubious. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

* * *

“ _In related news, the attack on Diamond Digressions dot com seems now to be the opening salvo in a full-fledged cyberwar, which has sabotaged infrastructure and left financial markets plummeting._ ” The man on the screen was solemn, hands folded together tightly, unlike his normal calm, confident showing.

Addy shut the door behind her, tuning out the television Kara had left on. The apartment wasn’t a mess, no, but it was clear that Kara had come through like a tornado if the smattering of clothes thrown over the back of the couch were any indication.

“ _Dozens of banks and lending institutions, including National City Mutual, released a statement calling this the worst digital data breach they have ever seen._ ”

Retrieving the remote, she brought up the guide and then jumped to the channels she liked, turning on the mute for the time being. The man continued to speak, no audio accompanying his words, and she liked it that way. Changing it over to cartoons, she unmuted it, turned the volume down, and dropped the remote on the table.

Pacing over to the kitchen, she tugged the door to the refrigerator open, plucking two of those calorie bricks out from inside. Popping the first one in her mouth, she worked it down into a rough crumble with her teeth, snagging one of the bottles of electrolyte-dense juice someone had named after an alligator. She personally thought the bottles would match the name much better if they made them look like alligators, maybe with a scaled texture that she could drag her nail down to make noises. That would be nice.

Shutting the fridge with her hip - because she was busy clutching two objects in one hand, no easy feat, despite the simplicity of the statement - she plodded back towards the living room, placing the bottle down on the table and stuffing the second brick into her mouth, adding it to the crumble she was working through. Dry though they might be, and tasting like overcooked oatmeal, it was truly convenient that she only needed to eat two of them to fulfill her caloric requirements for the day.

Popping the seal on the cap to her juice, she brought the bottle up to her mouth and begrudgingly let the fruit-punch flavoured liquid pool in her mouth, turning the dry, stick-to-her-flesh crumble into something more closely resembling wet cement. Despite the convenience, the fact that she had to hydrate the material to ensure she did not choke unexpectedly on it was a very real downside. She was personally just glad she’d realized she could fulfil her caloric intake requirement at the same time as she fulfilled her immediate need for fluids.

Draining the remainder of the bottle, she placed it down on the table and leaned back. The cartoons were just as bright as usual, a mess of colour and noise and all the things she wanted, but it was hard to focus on them. She glanced longingly at the divider that separated her bed from the rest of the living room. She wanted to sleep, not just physically, but mentally as well. She wasn’t going to be productive, but she had vivid memories of Taylor deciding a similar course of action and spending close to a month fighting to get her sleep cycle back into working order.

She stopped a yawn before it could escape her mouth.

Sufficiently technologically advanced alien species were, for better or for worse, outside of her realm of understanding. The gestalt had made a habit out of avoiding them for more than one reason, though the main one was that the more technologically advanced, the more risk of detection. That, and the fact that the more extreme a species’ technological state was, the less effective Tinker shards became. If a species was too primitive, the Tinker abilities handed out were extremely black-boxed, usually equated with ‘enchanting’; people made ‘lightning in a bottle’ for generators, and the shards were more limited with fewer regions of research that can be easily pursued due to the lack of inherent knowledge on the topic itself.

More advanced species were at the same time better and worse. They made Tinker shards less effective because they were, by themselves, inherently less appealing. In a society where laser-based weaponry already exists, the Tinker has to have _more_ extreme technology as a baseline, things which go beyond that, and as a result the restrictions on them were tighter. Combined with the fact that at the point where a species was generally utilizing weapons like that, the inherent body armour and other ‘baseline’ equipment handed out by Tinker shards became significantly less effective. It was one thing to make bulletproof power armour on Earth, as most conventional weaponry _was_ ballistic, but said things wouldn’t stand up to a species who had arms capable of generating blasts of plasma concentrated enough to rend through everything besides that which is literally invulnerable.

Humans really were the best of both worlds, to that end. Primitive enough that their own technology wouldn’t skew the balance so severely, and yet advanced enough that they understood the science to make said technology was out there, they just hadn’t quite figured it out yet.

Personally, despite it resulting in her being out of her element, Addy was leaning more towards ‘alien’. She had seen what Winn had meant, the hacker had seemed to just ignore most conventional security methods, seemingly without reason. She accessed things remotely she shouldn’t ever be able to, and the fact that she continued to elude the people they were hacking pointed towards something more sophisticated than anything humans could genuinely make.

She was out of her element, on this, because scientifically advanced species had never been taken into account. They were to be avoided or, better yet, never identified to begin with. If an already-seeded planet was to be approached by an extraterrestrial space-faring species, they were to attempt to conceal the planet itself or, if that failed, move the cycle to an alternative universe wherein the species wasn’t approaching. If all of that failed due to some catastrophic mismanagement, the approaching species was to be purged and the cycle considered too compromised to continue, and therefore the end-of-cycle interdimensional collapse was to take place, detonating every version of that planet to act as propulsion and fuel for the already-deployed shards.

It was protocol.

She was starting to get tired of protocol being the reason why she didn’t understand what she should be doing. She wasn’t good enough at computers for her to help in that way, she’d mostly been an aide to Winn for the duration of the night. She wasn’t knowledgeable enough on the various interstellar species of her past universe to adequately predict further actions. She had precisely no information on any of this outside of the ever-so-common ‘blow the planet up and cull all witnesses’, which was not a helpful recommendation.

Reaching up with her hand, Addy tried to rub the sleepiness out of her eyes. She was tired, very tired, despite the sufficient intake of nutrients to continue her body’s functions. Why had so many biological species developed a need for sleep? Why didn’t they just relegate the continued management of brains to some secondary system? She didn’t know, but she honestly wished she did. Sleep was frustrating, she didn’t _want_ to sleep. She wanted to be helpful, she wanted to be effective.

Peeking through the gaps between her fingers, Addy rolled to the side and reached for her laptop bag.

She still had some homework to do.

* * *

“Addy?”

She made a noise, garbled. What had happened? Last she remembered she was working through the PHP work.

“She’s out of it,” another voice said.

A hand came to rest on her arm, smoothing across her shoulder. She groaned again, forced her eyes open with great reluctance, her entire body fighting against her. She was in control, it was her body, if it wanted to—

It was dark out.

Addy blinked owlishly. _It was dark out_.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Kara said, drawing her gaze. She had stepped back, looking worn-down and tired. Addy’s laptop was in her hands, which she slowly placed down on the table. “You uh, fell asleep with the laptop perched on your knees. I’m surprised you slept still enough to not knock it off?”

That made no sense. “Why would I waste energy by moving?” That and she hadn’t been asleep, she hadn’t decided to lay down and go to sleep. Why had she gone to sleep? She could already feel the haze lifting from her mind, but it was still dark out.

Scanning the rest of the room, she spotted more people. Behind Kara was Winn, who looked haggard, and behind Winn was both James and Lucy, the latter of which was staring at her with an expression somewhere between fondness and curiosity. Dangerous levels of curiosity.

Addy squinted.

Lucy faltered and glanced away first.

Deciding that was enough of a victory and an assertion of dominance, Addy glanced towards the clock. Seven o’clock in the evening, she had slept eleven hours. She breathed in, rattled her fingers against her knee in silent protest. That was bad. She slept when she was supposed to be awake, and now her schedule was ruined. She was going to have to rectify that, or attempt to sleep regardless of just how much her body wanted to vibrate. That was bad, very bad, schedules were _important_ —

A hand came to rest on her hand. “You okay?” Kara asked gently.

Addy soaked in the warmth of her palm, the gentle pressure of her fingers, and swallowed. “Schedule,” she said, trying to get the words out, but losing them in the transit. Why couldn’t she just _speak_ right? She felt out of control, she had to recenter herself.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Kara soothed again, rubbing circles on the top of her hand with the pad of her thumb. “We can figure out how to slowly ease you back into a normal one, okay? I won’t say relax, but this is fixable.”

Addy found herself nodding along. She was right, this was fixable, just not right now. She was awake and focused like she was in the mornings, and she would just have to handle that as it came. She would be fine, or as fine as she could be. Kara said so. “Okay,” she said, easing her hand out from under Kara’s, who smiled brightly at her. Too brightly, she had only been operational for half-a-minute now, that smile was almost blinding.

Winn slumped down across from her in one of the seats, easing a plastic bag up onto the table. He retrieved several tablets from inside, standing them up with help from the case in a line, sticking the last object - his laptop - in the dead center between them. “I am so tired,” he complained, and the words broke the tension, the odd edge of awkwardness that had settled over them. Lucy laughed breathily, butting her head against James’ shoulder, while Kara found her own seat and almost curled up into it. “See, I’ve been working on this at work too, it’s why I brought some of my set-up with me, but none of it makes any sense.”

Lucy and James wandered over, slotting down on the side, Lucy tucking her legs up under her chin, socked feet perching on the edge of the couch, while James leaned forward a bit more, blinking at whatever he saw on the screens. “I understand literally none of this,” she said brightly. “But uh, my contacts are telling me you’re in a similar place to them. So.”

Winn shrugged. “Yeah, well, an oscillating variable matrix is hardly something you just come across on the regular. Not to mention it keeps hiding the hacker’s footprints. Diabolical, I tell you, and annoying. So, so completely annoying.”

Addy wiggled forward a bit, reaching out to open up the screen-sharing program. Winn’s computer dinged, and he glanced up at her wryly, tapping a key. Instead of a single window showing one screen, several appeared, completely filling in her screen with what looked like a lot of diagnostic information, among other things. It was starting to become easier to comprehend Winn’s workflow, largely because he was, as far as she could tell, teaching her exactly how he learned himself.

Most of it was still gibberish, though. She really did regret refusing the access port to the Tinker hub network when she had the chance—she’d only downloaded requisite information on how to weave and some skills relating to using and understanding bugs to help aid Taylor. Everything else, even the very basic connection to the hub, had been rejected. She hadn’t thought she’d needed it, but she was coming to learn that she probably had.

Resource inefficient as a pointless node connecting back to the Tinker hub was, she was starting to wonder if she had made an unreasonable risk in choosing to opt out of it. Maybe.

“You ate, right Addy?” Kara called out, having at some point marched back towards the kitchen. She’d been distracted with the constantly flowing text on her screen—not because she understood it, but rather because it kept making wonderful patterns.

Still, it would be impolite not to respond. Tearing her gaze away, Addy glanced Kara’s way, avoiding her eyes. It was too soon for eye contact, she hadn’t had enough time to process things. “I drank a single Gatorade - by the way, do they have an email for recommendations? I have _so_ many - and ate two of those oat bars.”

Kara’s head peeked around the corner, a smile stretching across her face brightly. “You’re getting that down well! Though I should really try to find foods you enjoy. It’s just been _so_ busy, first Astra, then the Master Jailer - that’s what we’re calling him, by the way, stupid name in my opinion, but that’s irrelevant - and then _this_.”

Addy blinked slowly, tilted her head to one side. She had assumed... “Is this not normal?” She had been working from the understanding that people with these abilities would have at least a few among their population with sufficiently mentally disturbed ideas to pursue criminal activity or simply seed chaos. It was, after all, not like they gave the hosts much in the way of a conflict drive—only particularly peaceful hosts - such as one of Taylor’s bullies, if she wasn’t wrong, who they had applied a significant degree of influence - ever got a huge degree of mental interference. Most of the time it was just enough to give the right people the right power and point them at a possible target for their trauma.

Kara’s smile slipped into something more chagrined. “It wasn’t before I became Supergirl. Maybe it was different for Kal—er, Superman? I know he used to complain to me _all the time_ about how he kept getting interrupted and stuff, but... Yeah, no, even just a year ago it wasn’t nearly this bad.”

“What would you consider ‘bad’ in the past?” Lucy piped up, looking genuinely intrigued.

A flush, bright red, crawled over Kara’s face. “Just, uh— _y’know_ , accidents, random. Usually.”

“ _Like_?” Lucy probed again, the word teased out mischievously.

The flush crept its way down Kara’s neck. “Like the one time I, uh, accidentally shattered Miss Grant’s desk because I couldn’t keep my strength in check but nobody was around to see it?”

“ _That was yo—_ ”

“Yes, Winn,” Kara interrupted, sounding hopefully embarrassed. “That was me, and so was the one time I accidentally tripped into a stack of chairs and ended up pushing the entire thing down eight flights of stairs. Not my proudest moment, but before now it was mostly cleaning up after my mistakes and, well, being me.”

“Is that why you remain in Miss Grant’s employ?” Addy found herself asking, eyes still focused on the screen in front of her. “Not the powers, but you emphasized ‘being me’, and I assumed that Miss Grant somehow provided you with comfort that you could not get as an alien, or as Supergirl, for that matter.”

Kara opened her mouth—

“That or she has a thing for women in power,” Lucy muttered.

—and turned bright red. “I do not!” She sputtered.

Winn and Lucy shared a look, one that Addy wasn’t really able to process, but that seemed to only set off Kara _more_. The flush had crawled up to the roots of her hair at this point, she looked almost like a boiled crab.

“ _Anyway_!” Kara announced, clapping her hands together with just a little too much force for what might be achievable for humans. Or at least, what might be achievable for humans without shattering their hands into fleshy bags of bony shrapnel. “Do you have a _plan_ , Winn?”

Winn’s head turned slowly, coming to a creaking halt as he stared at Kara. “Do I have a plan?” He echoed, sounding almost offended. “Of course I have a plan! I have created an inversion pathway which will, uhm, hopefully lead me to wherever she’s hiding. She could be, for all we know, organizing these attacks from the other side of the globe.”

“No.”

Addy’s head snapped around to the computer, so did everyone else for that matter. In one of the windows - the one for his main laptop, if she wasn’t mistaken - the woman was there, blonde and smiling.

“Does your computer have a microphone system?” Addy asked.

“It does no—”

“Just from the other side of your screen,” the woman said with just enough force to her voice that it was clear she had heard them. “You know, you’re fairly clever—for an _ape_.”

She mentally ticked off the ‘alien’ box in her head. She’d been right on that much, anyway.

“An—and you are, uh, freaking me out,” Winn said right back, leaning back on the couch, trying to get further away from his laptop. “For an evil blonde computer face.”

“Then let’s talk in person,” the woman replied smoothly.

Kara stepped forward, straightened her shoulders. “Name a time and a place,” she spat.

“How about now?”

Addy’s brain halted. That didn’t—

There was a sound, somewhere between static and metal grinding against itself. The front of Winn’s computer erupted, a spray of polygons, rough shapes coming together into a swarm that rapidly consolidated into a tall, blue woman. Lucy, James and Winn leapt away, scrambling away from the couch, as the woman took full shape.

Her body wasn’t biological was the first thing Addy really noticed. It was visibly synthetic, a mix of blue rubbery mesh and metal that covered her from foot to head. Her hair looked distantly ‘real’, though a closer look made it clear it was just strands of whatever material her body was made out of painted orange and allowed to naturally cascade down her body. On the top of her head, three dots were arranged in a triangle, each one red and glowing.

Addy eased herself to her feet.

“Supergirl,” the thing said in a breath, almost reverent if not for the twist of mocking in her tone. She began to approach Kara, each step a casual stride that rocked her hips like something predatory. “What _exactly_ makes you so _super_?”

The thing came to a stop in front of Kara, whose eyes were trained on her forehead.

“That symbol,” she murmured, sounding almost confused. “I’ve seen it before.”

“It’s the sign of my people,” the thing clarified, voice tight. “The Font of Omniscient Knowledge.”

The thing stepped closer, almost nose-to-nose with Kara.

Something that was almost a smile split her face, revealing too-white teeth. Her voice lowered into a breathy whisper. “I know _everything_ about you.”

“What _are_ you?” Winn said, not breaking the tension, only distracting from it. “Some—some, uh, living internet?”

The thing turned its head lazily, smiling at Winn. It didn’t reach her eyes. “You could call me that.”

Then she lashed out. One of her arms lifted, revealing thick claws with a recessed red dot in the flat of her palm, while the other clenched into a tight fist and lanced forward, slamming dead-on into Kara’s chest. She flew back with enough force to throw her through the window, the sound of shattering glass and metal briefly ringing in Addy’s ears, too loud.

The thing’s hand reached out quickly, closing around Winn’s throat with one and lifting him. Lucy, from behind, attempted to slam into her in a practiced shoulder-check, but only managed to make her stumble, bringing Winn with her. The claw lashed out, caught on Lucy’s throat instead, almost adhering to the surface as she was lifted too.

James, brandishing a chair, was moving towards the blue alien in a charge.

Addy flicked to Lucy, to Winn, to James. Humans, all of them. If she was simply human strength, she wouldn’t’ve been able to throw Kara like that. She reached out to that floaty sensation in her again, felt the steady drain of solar energy purr out as her feet left the ground. She burst forward, accelerating fast, swerving just narrowly around the table they’d been seated across from.

The thing’s head glanced up just in time for Addy to punch her in the throat.

Lucy and Winn dropped, both gasping wildly, as the alien was sent back with force. She hurtled through the air, met the wooden door, and shattered right through it in a spray of wooden fragments, landing in the hallway outside. James dropped the chair, rushing to Lucy’s side, while Winn tried to steady himself on the wall.

“Hold it right there!” Hank’s voice - how could she not know it? - boomed out, accompanied by the sudden rat-a-tat of gunfire. The bullets skipped off of the thing’s figure, sparking as it did, but didn’t seem to hurt her in any capacity. A snarl left the thing’s mouth as more gunfire hailed down on her before, with a lurch and a sudden blink of green, she transformed again; turning back into that mesh of small particles, swarming forward and back into Winn’s computer.

Kara landed back in the apartment behind her, looking around wildly. Her eyes snapped to Hank, and to Alex, who was standing beside him, her gun still held in her hands.

“Oh thank god we have our own personal black-ops unit,” Winn said, voice raspy as he finally managed to steady his breathing.

Kara rushed forward again, hands tight fists at her side. She was out the door and passing both Alex and Hank, who rushed after her, nearly in an instant.

“You’re an alien,” Lucy’s voice broke in, cutting through the silence.

Addy glanced towards her, blinked. “Yes.”

Lucy’s jaw tightened, she looked angry, but not exactly at her. “What type?”

“Shardite,” she responded, as was expected of her. “I’ve been living with Kara to help integrate with Earth cultures. I am still having problems with food.”

Lucy stared at her. “What—what _are_ Shardites?” She tried.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she replied, which was true. She did not want to talk or give any information about her purported species because it was not a conversation she particularly enjoyed having.

“Addy,” Lucy tried, pushing. “Please?”

Something knotted and twisted settled in her chest, and Addy found herself folding one arm around herself defensively. “Shardites are colony organisms with each member of a greater hub being unique but not independent from one-another,” she said. “I’m still getting used to it. Please drop this.”

For a moment, she thought Lucy would try again, her jaw firming up, her eyes too focused, but, with a breath, she nodded. “Alright. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said. Which was also true, despite her feelings on the topic, it was perfectly valid to ask what she was. She could be a threat, after all.

Lucy stared blankly at her.

James crouched down, easing a hand onto his girlfriend’s shoulder. She jolted a bit, glancing back at him, before smiling quietly, reaching out to wrap her fingers around his. He helped ease her back to her feet.

Kara stormed back in, breathing heavily. Her face was almost red with anger. “I need to call someone to get my door fixed,” she said frankly, eyes not looking at any of them. “All of you but Addy have to go.”

Hank and Alex were pointedly absent.

* * *

As it would turn out, IT was a lot less ‘doing things on the computer’, and rather ‘fixing other people’s hardware’.

Releasing the power button, Addy glanced towards her client of the morning. Georgie was an older lady who had worked with Cat since she’d been in the Daily Mail, if the woman herself was to be believed. She’d been Cat’s original secretary, but when it had started tearing their personal relationship apart, they had separated on good terms and Georgie had ended up getting a job handling a good portion of CatCo’s gossip page.

She was also having trouble with her printer.

“Does it still say the device is disconnected?” Addy asked.

Georgie flashed her a bright smile, the wrinkles on her face creasing. She was so pretty, so textured, and so nice. There was something very calming, very _warm_ about Georgie. She liked her a lot. Maybe not as much as Hank or Kara or even Cat, but the short time they’d been engaged had been delightful. Georgie seemed to understand her more than even Winn did, in terms of what she was asking and how. “It says it’s connecting,” she replied brightly, tapping on her keyboard. “Thank you, Adeline, you are very nice.”

Oddly, she didn’t really _mind_ Georgie calling her Adeline. Something about how she was made it feel almost _right_ being called the lengthened version of her name. Georgie was the type of person who used respectful speech still. “It’s okay, all I had to do was turn it off and on again.” It was a wonder why people didn’t know how to do this themselves. She’d fixed two other problems with exactly the same thing: turn it off and then on again.

The printer made a low whirring sound, evolving into a steady rhythm of ‘ka-chunk’ after ‘ka-chunk’. A piece of paper emerged from the top, still warm to the touch as Addy took it from the printer, glancing over it. On it was an image of a woman in shades and sweats walking a massive dog whose fur seemed to be purposefully styled into delightful little fluffy balls. On the top of the page, ‘Paris and her Poodle’ was written in big text, accompanied by ‘move to page 34 to see the details on this celebrity’s new best friend’.

Walking back over to Georgie, she handed the piece of paper over.

“This looks good!” The woman said, smiling down at it. “I do love poodles, such kind dogs, especially the big ones. Thank you for the help, that printer has been giving me so much trouble. You’re a dear.”

Addy blinked, and then nodded, turning back around and making her way to her seat.

“Georgie’s printer?” Winn asked without looking up from his computer.

Addy tugged her chair out, easing herself into it. “I believe the issue is that it at random disconnects from the computer, possibly due to mechanical failures, and is unable to reconnect until it’s rebooted.”

“That’d make... a lot of sense, actually,” Winn agreed, mumbling something else beneath his breath. “I’ll put a notice up for a new printer. Maybe this time I won’t have to plead my case for it.”

“I thought we’ve been over this Alex,” Kara’s voice interrupted. Alex, looking nice in her blue plaid and jeans, stepped out from around the corner, followed shortly by Kara, who was looking tense and irritated. “I’m out.”

Winn rose from his seat, glancing towards them with worry. Addy could empathize, Alex and Kara had grown tenser and tenser in each other's presence. She knew the reason, had kept the reason secret, but she really did need to tell Alex to speed the process up. It was going to cause a breakdown if not.

“I know,” Alex said gently, glancing towards Kara. “I didn’t come for you.”

Addy blinked, the thought emerging that it might be her. She was just glad she had managed to force herself to sleep last night, if that was the case, even if she’d only gotten roughly four hours of sleep, it meant that she was now on a diurnal sleep cycle. She did not want a repeat of the month Taylor had slogged through, weeks spent where she was so tired at all times. The exhaustion had caused mistakes, and there was no room for mistakes, not anymore.

Alex turned away, then, smiling at Winn. “I came for him, actually.”

Addy felt herself relax, then tense. But didn’t that—

““You what?”” Kara and Winn said at the same time, Winn half-jogging up to Kara’s side.

“He’s got a better grasp on python-6 malware encryption than _anybody_ at the D.E.O.,” Alex explained, glancing at Winn for emphasis. “If we want to permanently disable this alien cyber-threat, he’s our best shot.”

Addy did not like the fact that Winn didn’t look all that upset by the idea either.

“Why—I uh, I will _definitely_ not go if you don’t want me to,” Winn said quickly towards Kara, who shook her head resignedly.

“No no, it’s fine,” Kara lied, as her voice gave away how it was clearly _not_ fine. A state that Addy herself was in, very relatable. “Just because I stepped away from the D.E.O. doesn’t mean you can’t step in. We’re both still on the same side.”

“What about the CatCo computer systems?” Addy asked, startling all three of them. They had forgotten she was nearby, hadn’t they?

Winn just smiled. “Addy, it has been days since I taught you the requisite stuff to do all the things I do. You are _scarily_ good at soaking up and then putting information to use. I only really started teaching you stuff like JavaScript because I was genuinely more concerned with you becoming bored and trying to figure out the rest of the stuff I was showing you on your own.”

She couldn’t really understand _why_. She was perfectly beyond adequate at processing and utilizing information to positively inform her actions, and she wasn’t particularly impressed with the implication that she wasn’t.

Apparently, her thoughts were visible on her face, as Winn’s smile turned weak.

“Not that figuring things out on your own is _bad_ or anything,” he said quickly. “It’s just, you can pick up a lot of _really_ bad habits if you come into things without having someone to help guide you through the earlier stages. I didn’t want to turn around one day to find out you write code like YandereDev.”

Why was he speaking Japanese?

“You... did not understand that, huh,” he said. “Right, I should really introduce you to anime, and, like, show you how to _avoid_ all the creepy stuff in anime. Anyway, I think I should be going to the D.E.O.?”

Alex nodded. “I’ll take you there myself.”

“Great!” Winn said brightly, before catching the look on Kara’s face and deflating somewhat. “I mean, uh, good. Yeah, good, let’s go, uh, do that.”

Alex nodded, sent her sister a tentative smile, and then turned, Winn trailing after her as she marched towards where the elevators were.

James appeared out from the same direction, smiling awkwardly at Kara. “What was that about?”

Kara just sort of slumped, face knitted into a frustrated expression. “Winn was just drafted by the D.E.O.,” she said weakly, motioning towards the elevators.

“What?” James said, frankly too surprised for his own good. Maybe he hadn’t been around Winn enough, but had Winn lived in her universe, he would’ve been a prime host. He was unrealistically intelligent about coding, despite the fact that he was barely in his mid-20s he could outpace almost anyone. He was too smart, honestly. James was just wrong.

“Which means we just lost our best hacker,” Kara said, bringing Addy back to the present. “While we’re dealing with a living, extraterrestrial _computer_.”

James opened his mouth to say something, then shut it with an almost-audible _clack_.

“Now would be about the time where Hank would tell me what we’re dealing with and how to catch it.” Kara inhaled shakily, leaning backwards. “If it is alien, how do we get any info on it?”

Something smug, but not in a bad way - human expressions were so complex, she didn’t even know that was _possible_ \- slipped across James’ face. “Well, there is one place we can go to find out about aliens.”

The two of them stared at one another for a moment. James’ face slipped from smug, to confused, and then to a bit abashed. “I mean the Fortress,” he said, belatedly.

“Oh!” Kara said, face lighting up in comprehension. She twitched, then glanced back around, staring back at Addy. Something swam across her face, an expression that Addy couldn’t name, before settling on something almost shy. She glanced back at James briefly before motioning with her shoulder, turning back to her and walking the short distance between where she’d been standing and the side of Addy’s desk.

James followed obligingly, coming to a stop a few short feet away.

“I know this is a bit abrupt,” Kara said slowly, voice eager and restrained. “But, I uh, I figured I wanted to do this eventually, but, well. You’re, y’know, partially _like me_ ”—she whispered the last two words in a rush—“and I was going to ask, honest, if you uhm, would like to go and visit a place with some significant importance to my people’s culture.”

Addy just stared, not sure how to respond.

“It’s called the Fortress of Solitude,” she explained belatedly. “I never liked the name, personally, it hits a bit too close to home, with all of my memories of my old home, but, and you can say no to any of this, I was wondering, _maybe_ , if you would like to go there with me and James, since we’re going there anyway.”

“I have work,” Addy said, still processing.

Kara nodded. “And it’s totally okay if that keeps you here, alright hon? Just, I’m sure CatCo can survive for a little while without you, and we’ll be back quick. So?”

Addy glanced back at her screen, did a double check on the state of the servers. Nothing stuck out as wrong, the hacker had left them alone for the time being, too busy messing with Amazon and pushing the country steadily towards an early recession.

“As long as you can return me before the day is over,” Addy began, tuning out Kara’s happy - if quieted - squee of genuine relief. “I am willing to come with you to this fortress. Where is it, exactly?”

“Well,” Kara said, adopting that same smug look that James had. Not bad, just... _happy_. “How do you feel about a quick trip to the Arctic?”


	12. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy talks with an alien. 
> 
> It goes poorly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor (like, extremely) minor spoilers from Ward specifically about the shard network and other constructs of Wildbow's setting. I don't think it should spoiler much if anything at all, but it's always safer to preface with this when it comes to spoilers.

The arctic being cold was not exactly a new or exciting development. It was, after all, one of few places on the planet where factors made it so that it got little to no sunlight, even if you included the summer period. No, Addy knew well enough that the arctic was cold, but the fact that she _felt_ it was certainly surprising. It wasn’t with much intensity, admittedly, and a good portion of it she surmised was from the fact that she was rapidly hurtling through the air, chasing after the long-distant Kara, but it _was_ there. It sat on the fringes of her awareness, a low prickly chill that cut through the jacket she’d grabbed from home just before leaving.

The arctic was cold, and it was beautiful. It was also dark, considering the sun had yet to be able to rise in this region of the world, and wouldn’t yet until the latter half of March.

Starting her descent, Addy peeked through the hem of her hood at the landing zone. Kara was already there, had been there for at least five minutes now. Despite her own efficient use of flight, it was nowhere near enough to make up for the sheer force Kara had by contrast. Kara flew a lot like meteors or comets, streaking through the sky at speeds well beyond that of sound, though she had been forced to slow somewhat by the inclusion of James’ very fragile, very mortal body, and Addy’s own inability to keep pace.

Tilting her legs out in preparation for a landing, Addy eased off the acceleration and landed with only minimal fuss. The snow came up to mid-calf and had soaked into her pants already, even despite the extreme temperatures. James stood a few feet away, staring at her awkwardly, bundled up in a fur-layered jacket with his hood pulled up over his head. Kara, meanwhile, stared at her with a look of complete bewilderment, clad fully in her Supergirl costume and seemingly unbothered, even though she was wearing a _skirt_.

“How do you fly like that?” Kara said, her voice echoing oddly.

Addy blinked, glanced down towards the snow-covered ice, lifted her foot, and kicked down. It didn’t break, not even with some judiciously applied force to her heel. The ice below her didn’t even make a noise—it was too dense. She ignored Kara’s question, despite the validity of it, and hunched down, pulling the snow away from the ice near her feet.

“What is she doing?” James asked, barely heard over her concentration.

There was the sound of shuffling fabric. “Something’s probably grabbed her attention,” Kara explained. Correctly, too.

Shoving the last of the snow to the side, Addy stared at the bare ice. It didn’t look any different to normal ice, but...

“So, not all of us are aliens,” James started up again, just loud enough that she could not totally tune him out. “But I might actually be starting to freeze to death. Can we get inside?”

She flicked the ice with some force. It didn’t even crater, but this time she kept herself tuned in, kept her ears keen. There was a low resonation, not quite a vibration, but an oscillation. Nothing like she had ever heard, which was _very unique_ considering her core body was made out of crystal, and by extension the existence of something better than her current hardware was _important_. “This is not ice,” she announced, glancing up and pulling her hand away just in time to clear some of the snow that had collected on her nose.

“Uh, yes it is,” James said, somewhat dubiously.

““No, it isn’t.”” Addy and Kara said, in sync.

He stared at the two of them as though they’d just said something delusional. “Your cousin said—”

“My cousin wasn’t raised on Krypton,” Kara pointed out stubbornly. “And has a habit of not using his x-ray vision. That’s not ice, James, that’s an extension of the fortress. Kryptonian make, which, speaking of...”

Kara turned to her now. Addy found herself avoiding her gaze.

“There are more crystals inside,” Kara said in a tone that sounded... very sure of herself? Addy wasn’t quite sure, but it sounded confident and almost _clever_. “And there should be exposed veins of them, and though I’ve never _personally_ visited”—“ _You haven’t?!_ ”—“No, James, I haven’t. He offered plenty of times, but I just... I didn’t want to. Anyway, unless Kal-El has glued wood grain panels to the walls, which I doubt, there should be the exposed veins of the crystals for you to look at.”

Ah, no. She’d figured it out. Kara was tempting her.

It was working.

Wiping the snow off of her knees with a few well-aimed smacks, Addy nodded resolutely. “Show me,” she said, because this was _important_. She couldn’t study Kryptonite, despite its unique and wondrous qualities, and the crystals that made up the ground she was standing on were unique in their own way. Crystalline, yes, but nothing like anything she had observed before. She had to know more, not for any good reason too, she could acknowledge. She just wanted information on it, wanted to figure out _why_ and _how_. It felt natural, and she let the impulse drive her.

“Right!” Kara chirped, clapping her hands together as she swung around. The icy cliff in front of them, on closer inspection, wasn’t a cliff, but a wall. Someone had, at some point, carved half a foot deep into the pockmarked surface of the shelf, leaving behind a roughly rectangular indent. On that indent was, itself, the symbol Kara wore on her chest: a swirly ‘S’ inside of a diamond. “So, how do we get in? Is there like a secret password?”

“Well, about that,” James said, some energy coming back to his voice. He turned around, rubbing his hands together for a few seconds before finally crouching down and dusting off his own pile of snow. Why, exactly, he had been making statements about her doing the same was a question she had on the tip of her tongue, or at least she _did_ , because no more than a few seconds later he had cleared off a rather odd-looking golden object shaped a bit like a key.

“Really,” Kara deadpanned, sounding almost disappointed. “He put the key under the doormat.”

“Actually, he leaves the key out in the open when he leaves. See, this thing? I can’t lift it. Most aliens can’t lift it, it’s a million tonnes of condensed dwarf—”

“What.”

Kara and James snapped their heads around to her. Addy glanced away from them and to the key.

“Er, it’s a million tonnes of a condensed dwarf star,” James said slowly, almost carefully. “He uh, said it was made out of the core.”

As someone who had taken part in the strip-down and then consumption of dwarf stars for energy semi-regularly, she was having doubts. Part of the only reason they had been able to strip stars down was with the judicious application of highly advanced reality-warping abilities that had let them redirect the energy itself and dismantle the core safely. Which, additionally, a _million tonnes_? If that was what it was, then she definitely needed more information on crystals.

Kara ignored them both, stretching one arm down to easily pluck the key-shaped object off from the ground, staring minutely at it. “You want a try?” She asked, head glancing her way.

She didn’t. “No thank you,” she replied, because if that was a million tonnes she was not sure her body could completely lift it. Or if it could, it would drain a significant amount of her body’s solar energy storage to compensate. It was basically losing resources to look unintelligent in front of James Olsen. No. She could do without verifying if that was actually made out of a condensed dwarf star’s remains.

She would be having words with her cousin eventually, though. If none of this was true he was making a lot of very easily countered lies.

Turning away, Kara hefted the object a bit, angling it towards the little carved diamond. It was about three-fourths the size of one of her arms, and she needed to use both to properly angle the thing as she tread forward, pushing through the clumped-up snow around her knees, and gently eased the diamond-shaped end into the diamond-shaped slot.

There was a high-pitched keen, the area around the front of the key lighting up blue. The crystals shifted, groaned, snow from above the sheet fell away in clumps, James glancing up just in time to step out of the way of some of said snow landing on his head. He made a face at the snow, almost triumphant.

“Did you get hit before?”

James’ head jerked up in her direction. “What? Pft,” he glanced away awkwardly, reaching up with a hand to rub at his jaw. “Me? No. Totally not.”

So he had. She would keep note of that.

There was a single, loud _rumble_ as the mechanics behind the door finally fully kicked in. The carved piece of wall shuddered and then shifted to the side, sliding into the ice shelf, and opening the way.

Kara, ever-so-gently, lowered the key to the ground.

Addy glanced away from them both, stepping forward as she took her first look inside. It was _vast_ , made entirely out of a low-humming blue crystal that she could only barely pick up with her hearing. The ceiling was tall, run through with pillars of more crystal, and in the dead center of the area, two figures carved completely from it held up a planet. The floor itself was flat and smooth, but at random intervals small stubby crystals grew out from it, somewhat like calcite formations but with significantly more squared features near where they tapered off into points.

“Welcome,” James announced, his voice reverberating and echoing into the halls. Addy glanced his way, a bit startled that she hadn’t noticed either James or Kara enter with her. “To the Fortress of Solitude.”

James stepped ahead, motioning for them to follow. Addy glanced furtively at the bit of raised crystal, wondered if she could run more tests on it, see how it resonated, see if she could _recreate it_ , before finally, reluctantly, glancing away. Crystals were important, they were her—she didn’t think they got that. If, one day, someone came up with a new type of flesh, wouldn’t they be excited?

Still, obligingly, she followed after him and Kara as they made their way deeper into the fortress. They passed by the statues, hooking towards the right and off the path, passing through a small opening in the leftmost wall, the crystals all oddly squared off, much like before.

This room was much smaller than what she was beginning to assume was the entrance to the fortress. It was round, made entirely out of crystalline growths that reached all the way up to the lower ceiling. Here, the crystals had been left to grow more untamed, jutting out like thorny brambles along the surface of the wall, forming little alcoves within the room itself. In the center, surrounded by more crystal deposits about as tall as an adolescent human, was a crystal that had been clearly plateaued off and used as a display table. On it, placed atop a glass fixture, was a bracelet that gleamed beneath the blue artificial light that shined from some of the crystals in the ceiling.

Glancing around further, she caught sight of a few things. Metal scaffolding had been set up, with some of them rounded and arched, pressed against the crystalline surface.

“Hey, that’s the pod Kal-El arrived in!” Kara called out, drawing her attention again. True to her word, there was a pod, identical in virtually every way to the one she’d seen at the D.E.O. It was just big enough to fit a single person, adult or child, and was made out of metal, with a smooth, missile-like form factor to it.

“I can’t believe you never took him up on his offer to bring you here,” James piped up, glancing around himself. He looked calm, almost at home among the cold, unforgiving expanse of crystal. Addy wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Kara glanced back at him and smiled a sad, sad smile. “Well, I was afraid it would remind me too much of Krypton,” she explained, glancing away again as she made her way past the ring. “That or the opposite, that he would’ve used some of Krypton’s most valued and vaunted technology to make, I don’t know, a wood cabin out of crystal or something. He had such an _awful_ accent, I swear.”

Addy paced after them, glancing at the bracelet as she went. The bracelet, at its peak, was crowned with a flat hexagon, within which an ‘L’ and a swooping star had been carefully engraved. Nothing else was notable about it besides that, though it still felt oddly familiar, not that she could really figure out why.

“We don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to,” James' voice interrupted, drawing Addy’s gaze away. The two of them had come to a stop next to another piece of crystal, though this one had been plateaued off at an angle, and a screen displaying characters she had no context for had been inserted into it.

Kara shook her head, approaching the screen and idly wiping away at the snow and frost that had collected on it. “No no, it’s fine,” she mumbled, tilting her head to one side not unlike a dog as she fiddled with the screen. “How does this even work?”

James chuckled a bit nervously. “I thought you could tell me?”

Kara, not paying much attention to him, tapped the screen.

“Welcome, Kara Zor-El,” a tinny voice announced. Glancing up towards it, Addy caught sight of the source quickly. It was a robot of some kind, roughly humanoid just aborting at about the point where the legs would begin, floating seamlessly in the air. It was painted the colour of electrum, with iron-coloured accents, and in the place of a conventional face, it had a single wide rectangular yellow light that glowed brightly. “How can I help you today?”

It wasn’t sentient, Addy didn’t think. It didn’t have the presence sentient people did on her mental radar, and it was visibly robotic. Complex, yes, and high-tech, even more so, but... simple, in application.

“You know him?” James asked.

“Yeah,” Kara said, sounding a bit distant. “We had these back on Krypton, they served as robotic helpers. Kalex, can you tell us anything about an obnoxious blue alien species that works with computers?”

Kalex froze for a moment, glancing up at Kara as it approached. “Your description matches the Coluans,” it explained, motioning out with one hand to the side. “A highly intelligent race from the planet Colu. They served as supercomputers on Krypton, responsible for running day-to-day operations.”

Addy let her gaze linger on it for a moment, processing. It knew about other aliens, she realized. She still wasn’t sure if she was, in truth, the last of her kind. Yes, she was in a vastly different universe operating under sometimes unrealistic and bewildering rules, but she hadn’t quite been sure if her species existed here. Their absence would be notable, collectively it would not be too much to say that they had put an end to millions of individual species on individual planets. Perhaps not tens of millions, but enough.

None of this was even mentioning the threat of their existence. If they did exist out there, she needed to know. She was disrupting the sacrosanctity of the cycle, she was directly threatening the continuation of others. Secrecy was the key to their continued survival, and she was an imminent threat to that. If they knew of her existence, they would not stop at subsuming her; they’d likely take Earth out from orbit too, just to be safe.

“That explains the cyber terrorism,” James interrupted her thoughts. Again. He was good at that.

Kara nodded at him before glancing back at Kalex. “Were any of them prisoners on Fort Rozz?”

“One,” Kalex confirmed. “Her name is Indigo, a descendent of the Brainiac clan. She was captured while attempting to shut down Krypton’s defence system.”

They all went silent.

“Why?” Kara finally asked.

“Her objective: exterminate the entire planet’s population.”

Addy watched Kara and James glance at one-another, horror written across their faces. It wasn’t a huge leap to imagine they’d probably just realized her objective for Earth was likely very similar, or at least close enough that the end result wouldn’t matter. Still, it did bare wondering why she hadn’t done just that, it wasn’t like Earth was advanced enough to have a planetary defence system outside of an above-average arsenal of nuclear weapons that promised their own destruction as much as it did their enemies.

“She was deemed the most dangerous prisoner ever sentenced to Fort Rozz,” Kalex continued unabated, its voice echoing dully in the silence.

Kara and James turned in a sudden flurry of panic.

Addy couldn’t let them. “Wait,” she called out, and they did. That much she was glad for.

Kara glanced back. “Addy?”

“May I have your permission to ask it about other alien species?” Addy said, keeping her gaze steady. She had a few ideas of what to look for in terms of possible evidence of her kin existing, even if the robot had not catalogued the species itself. “I will be as expedient as possible.”

Something in Kara’s face softened, the panic receding to the fringes of her face. “Of course.”

“Shouldn’t we be telling Henshaw about this?” James interrupted, but Kara just tucked one arm into his, walking forward and preventing him from getting loose.

“We’re gonna go talk about that near the entrance, alright James?” Kara said. She didn’t ask, as she was already doing, despite James’ attempts at protesting this decision. He glanced between the two of them, but Kara gave him a look Addy couldn’t decipher and he went mostly compliant in her grip. “We’ll meet you there, Addy!”

Kara and a limp James disappeared through the entrance, leaving her alone.

Turning back around, Addy stared at the robot. It stared back.

“Hello,” she tried, because generally programmed AIs came with some degree of initiation protocol. Getting it engaged in a conversation string would be the easiest way to access its database.

“Welcome, UNKNOWN, CHILD OF EL.” The robot announced, before stopping itself. It tilted its head to one side, hovering closer. “Your biometrics, UNKNOWN MEMBER OF HOUSE EL, have been recorded. Please state your first name and the member of HOUSE EL you are descended from or related to.”

Addy blinked. “Addy,” she began slowly, turning the word over in her mouth. “I am related to Kara Zor-El.” Which wasn’t a lie, technically. It didn’t feel like one, the idea of being kin to something as Taylor had been was... warm in her chest. She did technically have Kara’s DNA, and it obviously wasn’t going to work with her if it didn’t get an answer.

“Running diagnostics,” Kalex stated simply, its entire body going still. Around them, the crystals _hummed_ for a few moments, little motes of light travelling down the vein-like structures they branched from. “Runtime complete. Welcome, Addy-El, child of UNKNOWN, cousin of KARA ZOR-EL. How may I serve you today?”

“I need you to run a search for a specific type of alien—colony organisms as large as planetary bodies.”

Kalex went still again. “Error. No results match your request.”

“Colony organisms on a continental scale,” she said, instead.

Another freeze. “Error. No results match your request.”

...That wasn’t right. She thought back, ran through her memories to a distant species. One that had shown the potential to become space-faring in a short period of time, had they not intervened. “Do you know of the Cathexis?”

The Cathexis had been an odd cycle. They had been, at first, possibly the golden egg to answer the question as to how to continue to propagate endlessly. As a species, they had somehow come upon the ability to create reality-warping fields and augmented very simple machinery into things capable of impossible feats. They hadn’t been able to figure out _how_ that worked with just orbiting observation, and so they had started a cycle.

Almost immediately, things had gone badly. The reality-warping fields responded poorly to the powers, generally caused them to glitch out at best, haphazardly mutate at worst. They also could make the shards themselves vulnerable over long periods of exposure, widening the dimensional link between host and shard until fractures in spacetime would open portals to them, allowing for them to be observed and even culled.

In the end, they had purged the entire planet after one of the noble shards had nearly been compromised, and then detonated it and archived what little they had gleaned in the two-dozen or so rotations they had spent on the cycle. Addy herself hadn’t even been deployed, hadn’t had enough time to find a suitable host before the call to purge had gone out and she had been cycled to the job of controlling the planetary bombardment process.

“The Cathexis,” Kalex began, drawing her back to the present. “Are a species of interdimensional space-faring aliens who are responsible for the creation of The Id. Their main known ability was the capacity to create reality-warping fields which could be used to achieve similar abilities to those of sixth-dimensional beings, including making something from nothing. They are currently relatively common among the outer reaches of this galaxy.”

Quickly checking her archive again, Addy paused. They had culled the Cathexis roughly two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand years ago. That was a large divergence, extremely so.

“Do you have on record any colony organisms which exhibit vastly different abilities between different clusters?” She asked, instead.

“Four,” Kalex replied. “The Yith, who exist in clusters of five and develop vastly different abilities depending on their local geography, and three non-sentient species of aquatic predator on Krypton, all variants of the Tigrus Eel. All are currently extinct; the Yith were purged by Krypton’s Military Guild after it became clear their existence on Krypton granted them similar abilities to the ones Kara is displaying under a yellow sun.”

Two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand years and no sign of them. “Thank you,” she said, instead, trying to hide her disappointment. She didn’t want them alive, didn’t want the risk to be out there, but it almost felt worse not knowing. Being the only one to know that they could be out there, lurking, waiting. It was an infinitesimally small chance that they would come across Earth in any capacity, but then the same could be said about her arrival on Taylor’s planet as well.

“You are welcome, Addy. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Shaking away the disappointment, Addy sent a loaded glance towards one of the crystalline growths. “Do you have any information on the crystals this place is made out of, and could I have a sample or three?” It wasn’t much, but it made her feel better. A consolation prize, as Taylor would call it.

* * *

Being back at CatCo felt very odd. There had been something deeply familiar about the crystals, the structures, the way everything had hummed and almost _buzzed_ with energy. It had felt like _her_ , in a way, and she hadn’t noticed that she almost missed it until she was back. The metal was nice, and so was the stuff her desk was made out of, but she kept expecting it to hum now, and it was bothering her.

She could, at least, feel happy about the bundles of crystals she’d shoved into her pockets. They were heavy, and sharp, and jabbed into her leg as she rocked her heel back and forth. It hard stopping herself from humming along with their quiet vibrations. They were rich with energy, if the odd-looking thumb drive Kalex had procured for her wasn’t wrong, and they were formed through a complicated mixture of science and luck. It was why the place had looked so roughshod—Kryptonian technology had been enough to make them develop and roughly shape them as they grew, but not so much they could directly contort them as they could most other materials.

It was fascinating, but she would rather not have to explain why she had a thumb drive made out of crystal to curious onlookers again, so she would be keeping it safe until she went home. Then she could look into it, and maybe even look into integrating the growth process into her core body. It wouldn’t be much, but she could probably completely remodel some of the information networks if she got the right environment going. It might take some energy, but it would be worthwhile.

“Shit!”

Addy jolted up and nearly jumped away as Lucy tripped haphazardly into Winn’s desk, taking a hard tumble over his chair. She landed on the ground without a noise of pain, scattering a folder across the ground.

“Lucy?”

The woman in question jolted up, staring at her. “Where’s Kara?!” She blurted, sounding panicked.

Addy tilted her head slowly to the side. “The room where they store all of the newspaper photography,” she said. “James is with her. They are discussing their ‘trip’.”

Lucy rushed forward, scooping papers up into her arms in a burst of motion, not quite managing to get all of them. She didn’t even turn to say thanks, as she had always done since Addy had been doing the same for her, and just about sprinted towards it.

Climbing out of her chair, Addy eased her way around the side of the table and stared down at a few of the papers on the ground. On one, simply, was a list of people who would have access to nuclear armaments. On another, an image of a man with his pants below his pasty butt, slumped over in bed and obviously out of it.

She flipped that one over before gathering the rest of the papers up into a single pile. Probably best that nobody else got these.

Making her way towards the storage room, Addy bundled the papers under her stump to give her hand access to the door handle. She hadn’t really thought being down to one limb would be a truly problematic situation, but she was starting to realize that humans not only didn’t design effective tools or equipment for left-handed people, but they also seemed to be under the absurd belief that either one-armed people did not need aid, or that they simply did not exist.

Considering America’s history of warmongering, she was leaning towards the former.

Addy pulled the door open—

“She was looking to declassify his entire online footprint!” Lucy’s voice boomed, in a near panic. “It was the only way to tell.”

“Lucy,” James said, his voice calming, soothing. Glancing further into the room, Addy watched him gently put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, which she shrugged off. She looked cornered, panicked, like an animal ready to lash out. “Tell what?”

“Which high-ranking official in National City has access to _nuclear missile launch sites!_ ”

The door shut behind her with a clatter. Three heads snapped around to her, James slumping with relief, Kara too, and Lucy just staring at her with almost unseeing eyes.

“Oh my god,” James said at the same time Kara blurted out a loud, half-panicked “ _Rao!_ ”

“Is she going to nuke the city?” Addy asked simply. The line of logic wasn’t particularly hard to follow.

Lucy shrugged jerkishly, folding her arms together. Addy reached under her stump, plucked the papers out, and handed them to Lucy, who grabbed them. After another moment, the woman relaxed a bit. “I’m sorry,” she breathed out, reaching up with one hand to comb fingers through her hair. “I—yes, likely. The nearest base with a silo is Fort Pemberton. It’s completely off the grid but seeing as she can move through _any_ technology anything the general himself brings onto base? Completely up for grabs, and he was doxxed in the truest sense of the word. She has his _cellphone number_.”

After another moment of silence, Lucy shut her eyes. “Sorry about nearly running into you, Addy.”

“It’s no problem,” Addy replied simply. Because it wasn’t. This was a problem, possible nuclear armageddon very much was.

“Well, then, I’m going to go _right now_ and make sure that doesn’t happen,” Kara said, already pulling her shirt over her head. Lucy shied her eyes away for the few seconds it took for her to realize that Kara wasn’t actually stripping down and she was, in fact, wearing the Supergirl costume beneath her clothes.

How, exactly, she managed to fit a skirt under slacks, Addy did not know. At this point she was assuming Kara had a pocket dimension, as otherwise there should be lumps all over.

“I’m never going to get used to that,” Lucy muttered just loud enough for Addy to hear.

“You will,” she said instead, watching Kara slip out of her slacks and pull her hair out of the high, painful-looking tail it had been in. “I am already used to it.”

“I can also hear both of you,” Kara reminded, reaching down beneath the table to pull her large, red-leather boots out from where she’d hidden them, already slipping one leg after another into them. “Addy, you stay at CatCo, okay?”

“No.”

Kara stopped, glancing up at her. “Addy,” she stressed, sounding stubborn.

“No, Kara,” and this felt like it was a long time coming. “I need to help.” Because she did, because she felt like she could. She had nothing else to do besides look up the crystal data and do some basic chemistry to see if she could replicate it in a lab. She could do any of that later, but she wasn’t about to let something like this happen again. There would be no incident like the Master Jailer once again.

“Addy, you don’t have a costume yet,” Kara tried.

But she had prepared for this, actually. Reaching into the pocket of her bright green pants, she pulled out a medical mask. It wasn’t much, just something she’d actually taken out of one of the restrooms, but it would do something to hide her identity. Combined with her hair pulled back into a bun as it was, and there was little chance of her being recognized so long as she remained fast enough.

“That’s not a costume,” Kara said, almost sullen.

Addy twitched. “That’s not an argument.” Not a good one, at least.

“I _need_ to do this, Addy,” Kara said, instead. “I—what if she kills you?” Something about how she said that was thick with grief, almost enough to put her off.

But, no, there was no debating this.

“What if she kills you?” Addy echoed, and that much brought Kara up short.

For a moment, Kara just stood there, her last boot almost on, before finally deflating. “Fine,” she groused, easing the rest of the red leather up against her leg and fastening it in place. “But I’m not slowing down for you,” she said bluntly, blurring around in a moment of super speed to wrench the door open, her cape fluttering behind her. Then, without another word, she rocketed forward and out of the window, leaving her behind.

That wouldn’t do.

Pulling the mask onto her face and pulling her hood up over her head - she hadn’t taken her jacket off, despite the heat, as her ability to ignore temperatures went both ways, thankfully - and tightening it down against the top of her skull with a few tugs on the cords near her collarbone, she made her way towards the window.

“Are you sure we should be letting her go?” Lucy asked somewhere behind her.

James grunted. “Do you think you can stop her?”

Addy pressed the heel of her shoe into the base of the window and very simply launched herself out of it.

Nobody could stop her from protecting. Not again.

* * *

Following Kara, despite her speed, was not difficult. Kara moved at speeds fast enough to disrupt and alter the clouds and other atmospheric fixtures as she went, and she had clearly not held back this time around. She could still hear the sonic boom rattling in the back of her ears, though she could no longer see Kara’s red-and-blue costume. She had long since outpaced that.

Dropping out of the cloud layer, Addy peeled her eyes for anything out of the ordinary. The base was somewhere in the dead of the shrublands, she assumed, and at this point she was nearing the end of Kara’s disruptive trail. It had to be around somewhere, especially considering the context.

Unfortunately, despite the flight and other applicable abilities, Addy did not have the super-hearing or sight needed to pick out something sand-coloured in a vast stretch of sand-coloured earth.

Fortunately, then, she did not need super-hearing to hear the sudden eruption of force, nor super-sight to watch a missile lurch itself out from beneath the earth near the horizon, blitzing itself into the air. Kara’s figure, red and blue, exploded out from a small lump - now, on closer inspection, probably a bunker - in the ground, blazing after it at high speeds.

Addy watched her go, watched the missile and the person she was supposed to be protecting fly off at speeds she could not match. It felt oddly like the moment just before Contessa had killed Taylor, something innocuous that ended abruptly and violently, unexpectedly. Taylor’s death by The Warrior had almost been an absolute, a high percentage chance, but Contessa? It had been very low. She hadn’t even really been acknowledged as a threat to Taylor’s wellbeing until it was already too late to prevent it.

Glancing towards the bunker, Addy shot forward again, dropping altitude quick. The sound of the missile flying into the air petered off, grew distant and faded, until she couldn’t hear it at all, her feet hitting the ground shortly after.

The front of the bunker had been ripped apart in Kara’s desperate bid to chase after the missile. What had once been a secure metal door had been shorn off and thrown to the ground to the left, while the hallway leading up to it was a mess of metal dents and tears. Stepping through the opening, she walked down the long metal hallway, her feet clattering against the mesh beneath each heel.

There was a turn, she took it.

Indigo sat next to the launch bay, the window open and slightly scorched black from the missile’s launch. She smiled luridly at her, unpleasantly, like the cat who got the canary. “Supergirl’s going to die with that nuke,” she cooed malignantly, a laugh thick in her voice. “It’s going to land and wipe that fucking city off the face of the earth, and what, you’re here? Looking for her sloppy seconds?”

Addy blinked, tilted her head to one side. Indigo’s presence was there, and it felt... familiar. A similar infrastructure to other shards, somewhere between synthetic and not. A bit antiquated, yes, and different in some ways, but she could accommodate that. She started adjusting her ability, let it click on and brush over the creature in front of her. She could probably initiate a connection, she was just going to have to rely on Broadcast for it.

“Nothing to say? Shame, I do want to know more about your _species_ ,” Indigo spat, easing herself to her feet with one limb. “So I can _find the planet they’re on and fucking destroy it._ ”

Ah. There’s the connection. It was looking for access ports, then, part of how Indigo interfaced with technology? No matter. She could figure that out later. Adjusting the psychic bandwidth to accommodate wasn’t hard, it was more like reverting it to her pre-seeded state, back when interfacing with other shards was more important than hosts. The changes settled into place, an open port.

Indigo, if the way her face lit up, _noticed_. “Now, what’s this?” She said giddily, glancing over her. “You’re flesh and bones, but if that isn’t an invitation, well, I’ll eat your corpse. After I finish taking you over, anyway. It's been a while since someone has invited me in. I wonder where you've been hiding the robotic bits?”

“I sincerely doubt your ability to do so,” Addy said, frankly. Because even if she could manage to eat _this_ body, her coreself was another thing altogether.

“Well, I’ll just see about that, now won’t I?”

Indigo didn’t move, didn’t even turn into her odd data state. She didn’t need to, Addy was an open port, broadcasting her willingness to be connected to. Instead, she _felt it_ , felt the brush of telepathic abilities meeting, intermingling, and then forging the connection.

Her port allowed it all in. Took every last thought, and pulled it down into the network.

* * *

The network was as dark as it had been since Taylor’s body had been taken from the other universe. The shard network itself was not totally physical or totally virtual, but rather an odd combination of the two. It was built into the multiversal lattice and was meant to connect shards settled into different dimensions across a vast barrier using representative avatars to facilitate communication. Before, it had been alight with activity, red pinging off in the deep void far, far away.

Now it was just quiet and dark. Her part of the network was all that was left, a single red-crystal island floating in infinite emptiness.

Indigo’s arrival was _felt_ , not heard. She hadn’t adjusted to the change in setting very well, was clearly struggling to take on a virtual form, an avatar. She was not used to Addy’s infrastructure, but she could help that.

Folding the instructions into herself, she shifted, pulled energy from her coreself, the red crystal around her blooming, flickering with energy, and then Announced.

**[INSTRUCTION]**

The shapeless mass that was Indigo’s consciousness flickered, shuddered beneath the weight and content of that data packet, but received it. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the blue figure of Indigo took shape down on the crystalline floor below, stumbling a few steps as she reoriented herself.

Addy was above, far, far above. Shards all had avatars in the network, it was part of the defence protocols for it. Hers was one of the largest, and shaped to her wants. She was made up of a single core, from which tens of thousands of red crystalline stems branched out, forming a rough outer shell that bore a strong resemblance to the end stages of a dandelion’s life, when they turned all white and wispy. From her inner core came arms, easily a hundred feet long and eight in total, each one with twelve joints and with the last joint on each arm branching into two separate forearms, with each of them being equipped with dozen-fingered hands, all made of an identical crystal to her main body.

She unfurled her arms from where she had tucked them around her core in the mockery of a hug, let them dangle low and scrape against the crystal valley her end of the network was represented by.

Indigo looked up. Stared vacantly as Addy began to descend, using her arms to push and guide herself properly down and down.

She reached out to the network and shut the door behind Indigo, cut off the connection. Indigo didn’t notice, but then that had been intentional, it was designed that way. Addy tucked the fact that she was trapped into another packet of data, primed the telepathic link, and Announced for the second time.

**[SUBMIT]**

Indigo’s physical form shuddered, parts bleeding into swathes of green static before painfully recollecting itself. The thing looked scared, now, but also angry. Cornered. It did not like this; Addy did not blame her, she would not like what was going to happen either.

She had brought her here to make her _submit_. If all went to plan, she would shackle Indigo’s consciousness under strict unbreakable laws. Do not hurt Kara, do not do things which could cause Kara emotional pain, among others. They were simple, and they were enforceable, now that she was in the network, in the hub that represented the true weight of her psychic abilities.

Still, she wrapped her ultimatum up, pushed the intent into it. Announced.

**[SUBMIT]**

Indigo’s form exploded for a moment, going completely incorporeal, a mass of shifting, unthinking static. Her consciousness, despite its vast strength, was _weak_. Intelligent, yes, but submissive. Shardlike in composition, the result of being a small part of something larger.

“No!” Indigo screeched, the audio data sent as a packet. Inefficient, only the audio itself, none of the meaning Addy could pack into her own declarations. “No! I refuse! How dare you, I am _Brainiac 8_ , second only to the original, I am beyond you! I was connected to the vast Coluan interface! I am more!”

**[SUBMIT]**

Indigo staggered, her arms blasting away into static before reconsolidating. “No, no no no no no!”

Addy reached down, pressed her many fingers into the ground around Indigo, circling her in. She would submit, she would be under her chains, locked and prevented from harming Kara, or she would not do anything at all.

“I REFUSE TO BE SHACKLED!” The audio packet screeched, loud and angry.

...Then she would be taken. Addy gathered the information, drew it into the telepathic space, and wrapped around it the weight of her intent. Another ultimatum.

**[SUBSUMPTION]**

Indigo only staggered this time, having apparently finally managed to receive information packets on that size without virtual errors. It was just that she remained staggered, completely frozen, before her head slowly panned up to where her faceless mass of crystal was, the core surrounded by endless branches of crystal. The thing that she was, even despite being Addy.

“How dare you,” Indigo sent, her voice flat. Empty. Aware. But afraid, so, so afraid. “I would die before I let _a parasite_ take me.”

Addy’s hands reached in more quickly. The network lit up, reds illuminating the crystals, brightening until each were miniature suns. Ready to accept the new influx of information she would gather from Indigo. If she would not submit, then she would be subsumed, her information used to protect Kara better. To be used for _more_.

Indigo shattered, the screech of something killing itself rattling through the empty network. She’d felt this before, the shredding of consciousness, the loss of information. Something inside of her twisted, was felt in the feedback from her body. Shame, she thought it was. Memories of Taylor doing the same swam in front of her consciousness; she ignored them.

Indigo’s body faded, it was only an avatar to represent the physical consciousness of something existing in a network. There was no longer any consciousness, and by extension, it was no longer an avatar.

Her fingers passed through the remnants of the data, drawing it back into her. She gave what was there - not much - a short glance. Most of it was corrupted, but some might be salvageable. She sent it back into the network, to be processed later.

She would have had so much value, had she just accepted.

* * *

Returning her consciousness from the shard network was not difficult, though it was disorienting. Coming back to herself and having a sense of touch again felt... odd, not wrong, just odd. On the ground in front of her, Indigo was in pieces, a dusting of what she was now realizing was a curious nano-material that could reconfigure itself. They were still connected through the network, though the connection was already fraying.

She urged the material back together, formed it into a solid cube about the size of her fist, with the three dots representing the Coluan database left there. It was as blue as Indigo was, but inert. Dead.

The connection fizzled, faded, and then went away entirely. There was no mental presence left for her to psychically bond with, it was just material, now.

Reaching down, Addy eased it from the floor and held it in the palm of her hand.

“Addy?” Kara called out, her footsteps loud and clear on the metal.

She turned, catching sight of the dead bodies around her. Some feedback from the knowledge she had managed to get out of Indigo’s consciousness informed her that it was her doing. She hoped that most of the salvageable information wasn’t just the thoughts she had been going through on her day-to-day. That would be very frustrating.

Kara came to a stop at the entrance to the room, glancing towards the cube in her head. “Is... where’s Indigo?”

Addy held the cube out. “Here.”

There was a short moment of silence.

“Addy,” she said slowly, each word rough in her throat. “What did you do?”

Well, that was simple. “I stopped her.”

“How?”

Even simpler. “She shredded her consciousness after I allowed her access into my network and made an ultimatum that she could either be shackled into obedience to you or she could be subsumed. She is gone, now. This is all that is left.”

Kara wasn’t looking at her, only the cube. “Why?”

...Wasn’t it obvious? “To protect you, of course.”

* * *

Kara was not looking at her. Kara was not talking to her.

She was just quiet. Distant.

The blanket around her shoulders felt like nothing. It was one of those shock blankets, reflective, it should’ve been one of the things she got enjoyment out of, but it felt... numb. Pointless.

Winn was on her other side, idly glancing down at the cube she’d given him. Kara and Alex had wandered off to talk, about what, Addy had not been privy to. She had refused to use her powers to listen in, for better or for worse.

“Did I do good?” Addy asked, not sure herself.

Winn remained silent.

Addy felt her heart drop.

Glancing up, she watched Kara enter back into the room. Alex and Kara weren’t talking either now, though the way Alex looked like a thousand pounds had been lifted from her shoulders seemed to give an obvious clue as to _what_ they had talked about. Still, they walked closer together than they had since Addy had first arrived, they looked closer too, less innate tension. Alex had told her about Astra, she assumed, and they had reconciled over it.

Good, she was glad.

Kara stared at her, her face purposefully blank. Addy stared back.

A few moments later, the hesitation so felt, so blatant, Kara approached. Each step was slow, and Alex remained where the two of them had come to a stop.

“Hank needs to talk to you,” Kara said, voice inflectionless.

Addy blinked. “Why?”

“Well,” Hank’s voice cut in, startling them both. He was stepping through a door just a few feet to their right, still dressed up in his military-grade equipment. He and Kara shared a look, a kind one, before he glanced at her with something like fondness. “We need to talk about your vigilantism, Addy.”

...Oh, right.

“Once is chance,” Hank said, Kara retreating with him here, back to her sister. She hadn’t looked at her for longer than 10 seconds.

Her heart felt cold. She didn’t like this. She did the right thing, she stopped a threat. She had given the threat an ultimatum, and when the threat had refused, she had moved to use the resources she represented for the betterment of everyone.

She acknowledged that subsumption wasn’t _pleasant_ , and that she wouldn’t enjoy it, but _she_ wasn’t Indigo. Neither was Kara, or Hank, or even Winn. Indigo was... worth less. Her loss, calculable; her resources, exploitable.

“Twice is a habit,” Hank finished, yanking her out of her thoughts. Addy stared up at him, tried to find that same amount of warm enjoyment of his features that she had when Kara had been nice. She couldn’t. Something in his face softened at her look, and he crouched down, a sigh on his lips. “So you’ll have to come in tomorrow to go through power testing, alright? We’ll talk about Kara then. Just know that she’s trying to process what you did, and she’s not sure how she feels about it.”

“Did I do good?” She found herself asking again, almost impulsively. She didn’t do impulse. She was rational. She was calm.

She was fine.

Hank smiled sadly. “I think you did the best you could.”

It wasn’t an answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you looking for a rough approximation of Addy's shardvatar, this is what her core body looks like (just red and sans the LEDs, obviously): https://imgur.com/a/ZoVRkSy


	13. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy shows off her skills and has a heart-to-heart.

Addy was awake before Kara’s alarm. This, itself, was not unprecedented; she had come to realize over the span of her waking existence that her relationship with sleep was tenuous at best, completely and utterly arbitrary at worst. Sometimes she slept the entire night and only woke when Kara’s alarm would screech its unholy song, other times she woke repeatedly through the night, blinking awake for moments at a time before dozing back off again into fitful dreams she couldn’t remember.

Today was none of those. She had spent the majority of last night occupied by the data on the crystal thumb-drive. Kryptonian crystals - they didn’t really have an individual name for the material, turns out - was a widely versatile piece of incredibly intricate engineering. The crystals, depending on their composition - being a material made up of a highly complicated network of unique chemicals and elements - could serve a multitude of purposes from data storage, energy storage, even as a simple structural material. As far as she could tell, the crystals somehow... _contained_ information in a way that was very easily retrieved and repurposed.

It was fascinating, and completely beyond what her kin had managed to achieve. Not to say that her own coreself didn’t bear some similarities. Her own crystals served comparable purposes, but with significantly less ease. Energy and data storage her crystals could compete on, if with some significant detriments to durability - which was why information and energy storage was located beneath layers of near-impenetrable diamond-like crystal that made up her outer shell - but the fact of the matter was that it was only abstractly comparable. Her composition as a shard was the result of millions of years of material sciences being stress-tested in the vacuum of space and in other extreme environmental conditions, such as being able to endure the complete and total destruction of planets far larger than Earth. Not only that, but unlike Kryptonian crystals, certain parts of her crystalline mass needed connective materials between them; the hard outer core was a completely different thing to her data center, which meant interfacing between the two had energy loss.

Yet, still, the Kryptonian crystal matrix was significantly better, but _expensive_. Resource expensive, almost certainly, and the exotic materials needed weren’t exactly easy to come by. Certainly, she wouldn’t need much to begin the growing process herself, but most of the materials described would require significant investment into functions she hadn’t need to activate since the first several months after being seeded on her barren Earth to begin with.

With great reluctance, despite the _possibilities_ , she was going to have to shelve it. At least for the time being, until she could find a way to access a source of energy for her core body. Unfortunately, unlike one of Annette Hebert’s former companions, she was among the vast majority of shards who only had the so-called ‘one-way energy access’, in that she could push energy into a target, but not retrieve or draw energy from said target. The required dimensional connection to draw energy outside of her coreself’s dimension was something most shards lacked, as it was expensive and generally time-consuming to upkeep, and bore little purpose outside of specific environments.

So if she ever wanted to fix her energy crisis, it was going to have to be more direct.

Blinking sleepily up at the ceiling, Addy tucked her fingers tighter into the blanket. Crystals were nice, yes, but that didn’t really fix or placate her current dilemma. Kara hadn’t gotten home until late last night, apparently having to go and save several people from a lab fire that had erupted as a result of a failed experiment. She had at the same time stayed up waiting for her to return and mostly stayed up going over the notes Kalex had compiled for her, and by the time she had gotten to sleep - somewhere around 1:30AM - Kara had still yet to get home, though at the very least the news made it abundantly clear she hadn’t been kidnapped, just busy.

By her estimate of the relative position of the sun, the date, and the digital clock propped up next to her laptop, it was 5:43AM, which meant she had received a total of four hours of sleep, and Kara’s alarm would be going off in approximately two minutes. Her sleep, much to be expected, had been stilted and unpleasant. She’d dreamt of Taylor again, she knew, but she didn’t know much else than that, just that Taylor had been in it, Taylor had been there, and her mind had protested waking wildly as a result.

The only real upside to any of this was that she didn’t have to work today and by extension wouldn’t appear to be an idiot by being sleep deprived in front of people she worked with. She’d gotten the day off with a doctor’s note made up by the D.E.O. to cover for her coming in for power testing, and it had been accepted with little fuss. The shift manager at CatCo had only asked if she was okay, and when she’d clarified that she wasn’t sick, just going in for one of her regular check-ups, the line of conversation had been mostly dropped and she’d been allowed the day off.

She was supposed to come in to the D.E.O. at a ‘respectable time’, but apparently, they didn’t do exact schedules, or at least they didn’t for her. It was at her leisure, in a manner of speaking, so long as she got there before noon and was prepared to spend at least four hours going over her skills. Hank had been plenty kind on that, stressing that she wasn’t in any trouble for using her power, but that being a vigilante once was an aberrant situation, twice was the start of a habit, and they didn’t want a repeat of Supergirl’s first couple of outings if they could help it.

Addy could honestly respect their preparedness, or at least their unwillingness to let her cause a major oil spill in National City’s coastline. She could also respect their drive to acquire information about her strengths and weaknesses presumably in the event that she became a hostile combatant. While she wasn’t particularly thrilled about someone having said information with the extremely small but nevertheless existing possibility of one day coming into conflict with them, she was at least a little impressed at their foresight. Most humans would’ve just accepted her without excess amounts of suspicion, and hopefully the D.E.O. could be the next step forward in inspiring humans to be prepared for eventual conflict among their peers, positive or otherwise.

More people could do with being like Taylor.

The startling klaxon of Kara’s alarm broke the silence and her train of thought. The sound was electrical, a tinny reverberation that she loathed almost as much as the texture of q-tips, and it lasted precisely half a second before an accompanying _crunch_ of something shattering beneath great force bellowed out into the apartment.

Addy was wide awake in a heartbeat, shoving herself free from her blankets and trotting over the cold wooden floors and out from behind her dividers. The apartment was still gloomy, dark in the shadowy cast of early dawn, and she could spot nor sense no intruders. She let her pace slow as she made her way around the dividers, past the couch, and into the slip of space Kara left open between the curtains that she used to portion off her bedroom.

The woman in question had her hand half-embedded in what was obviously the mechanical remains of her alarm clock. Kara blearily stared at her for a moment, something odd in her expression, before she slowly drew her fist out of the bits of plastic and circuitry she’d crushed, small shards raining down on her bedside table as she pulled it free.

“Kara?” Addy asked, not really sure. She hadn’t spoken to Kara since she’d rushed off to go and do Supergirl stuff. Alex had been the one to drive her home - a quiet and awkward thing - and Kara had returned sometime after she’d already been asleep. She wasn’t sure where they stood, or if they even stood anywhere at all.

Kara made a low noise, shaking her hand loosely to dislodge some other pieces of loose alarm clock still tucked into the creases along her palm and between her fingers, so tiny they might as well be grains of sand, but still solid enough that they could be heard as they fell onto the bedside table. “What?” She asked, a little gruffly.

“You broke your alarm clock,” Addy informed her simply, glancing to where the ruins in question were. “Did somebody attempt to attack you?”

Kara stared at her. “What? No, obviously.” She huffed a little, finally pushing herself up into a sitting position, her blonde hair tousled and wild on her head, forming wavy bunches. “I just had a bit of a super-strength mistake. Everyone does.”

Not particularly. “I don’t,” Addy informed her, because she didn’t. Controlling the strength of her body was rote and simple, it was part of the energy conservation methods she had used to ensure she wouldn’t burn the solar energy her body contained without it serving a purpose. Her strength was always comparable to that of a human until she needed it not to be.

Kara’s stare turned into something sharp. “Yeah, well,” she started, reaching down to haul the blankets off of her lower body, shoving them to the side with a few kicks. “Not everyone can be _you_ , Addy.” The words came out a bit too harsh, tinted by anger and something like dismissal.

It was hard to describe the sensation that came with that. It was something like having the breath knocked out of her, it felt just as bad, a tight fist wrapped around her chest, but it wasn’t physical. It just _hurt_ , made the words she wanted to say refuse to come. Kara just glanced away from her with a flick of her head, easing herself up onto her feet as she stumbled towards her wardrobe.

When Addy made no attempt to move, still not particularly sure what to do with herself, Kara glanced her way. Her eyes narrowed again, and Addy felt her body tense involuntarily. “What are you still doing standing around?” Kara asked, almost demanded. “It’s nearly six, I need to be in for work at six-thirty to make sure Cat doesn’t have an aneurysm about whatever problem she has today, and you’re in for seven. Go and get dressed.”

Addy swallowed, her fingers twitching. “I’m not going to work today,” she reminded her, her voice pitched flat. She could respond to this, it wasn’t anger, just demands. She was fine. “I’m going to the D.E.O.”

“Great, then go and do that with the shadowy government agency somewhere _else_. I need to find something to wear, I know for a fact I have that black dress with green and pink details _somewhere_.”

* * *

“So, where are we going, exactly?”

Alex glanced back at her, not pausing her walk. “Well,” she started, head turning back around to her front as she led the two of them down yet another stretch of boring, utterly _bland_ underground black-metal-reinforced corridor. “For starters, we need to get you into some gear for testing.”

Addy felt her face cramp a little. She knew what the D.E.O. saw as ‘acceptable’ clothing, and it certainly wasn’t anything she was about to wear. “I don’t want to wear black.”

Alex’s stride slowed a bit as she approached one of the doors tucked into the hallway wall. “You won’t have to” She reached forward, quickly tapping several numbers on the keypad just next to the door. There was a short, chirp-like beep from the keypad, and a green light blinked to life above the door. “Our tech guys—they wanted to make better suits for us with features we picked up from alien tech. That or just to fool around with technology usually well outside of our understanding.”

The door hissed as it slid open.

Addy approached slowly, her pace picking up as Alex vanished through the doorway. Getting her first glance inside the room after only a few steps, she was somewhat caught up by how messy it was. It looked like the bulk majority of the base - in that it was made out of black metal with recessed lights and metal benches, all both bland and uncomfortable-looking - but it was absolutely thick with abandoned projects. Really, it reminded her of some of Taylor’s memories of Tecton’s workplace, pieces of gear laying around with wires haphazardly exposed, half-finished guns and crystal-powered weapons.

Alex, near the back of what was becoming increasingly clear was a storage area, was hunched over, rooting through a wooden crate about half her height. “So, they found this tech from a local group of smugglers made up of Kalvars. They’re birdlike aliens, have wings and talon-like feet, and are notably telepathic. They’re known as the ‘bird-men bandits’ for a reason—there were more than a few on Fort Rozz, and they’d come together to try to smuggle things on to and out of Earth.”

Stepping into the room, Addy glimpsed a box full of purple, vaguely glowing crystals next to a terminal-shaped object made almost entirely out of what looked to be obsidian. On the front of the terminal, with no indication of a screen embedded, was what looked to be a UI in a language she didn’t speak with a single window displayed, showing three short blocks of text and an accompanying pictogram of a ruined piece of technology.

“Found it,” Alex announced, drawing her attention back around. Alex stood, bringing with her a sleek bodysuit that... well, was hard to describe, in truth. It was nominally iridescent, with any light that reached it being wildly distorted and skewed into bright colours that cast themselves across the suit in random patterns. But it was too... for lack of a better term, _bright_ ; iridescent things such as oil or soap bubbles tended to have the rainbow effect layered over a colour beneath it, such as black, but this didn’t _have_ that. It was just a constantly shifting rainbow, with each colour bright and distinct.

Alex extended the bodysuit towards her. “This was supposed to be invisible,” she clarified after a moment. “Kalvars are known for their cloaking tech, and when combined with their ability to read people’s thoughts it makes them incredibly good at smuggling things on and off planet. Sure, they can’t hide as a human very well without more technology, but before we managed to shut down the smuggling ring they had stripped four nearby zoos down of any and all animals and sold them to wealthy interstellar moguls who wanted something ‘exotic’. For reference, they included the people looking after the zoo among the ‘animals’.”

Addy bit down on the urge to point out that humans were just very intelligent, very well-adapted animals. It wasn’t like she didn’t get it, in truth, the discomfort around being compared to something that you used as chattel was an unpleasant and unwelcome experience, but then again that hadn’t stopped humans from turning their own kin into chattel either. Humans, to this day, were still incomprehensible.

Reaching out, she took the bodysuit into her own hand. Paradoxically, like most other things, it felt different than what she’d expected, too. She had honestly expected something with a texture close to plastic, or a raincoat; something crinkly and slightly uncomfortable. Instead, it felt like silk, particularly somewhere between dragline spider silk and silkworm silk. She pinched a bit of it and pulled, and it was also elastic.

This was a wondrous material, she decided.

“Despite the failure to properly mimic Kalvar cloaking, it is pretty durable. The only reason we haven’t had anyone wear it is, for starters, it’s kinda, y’know, hard on the eyes.”

“It is not.” Addy interrupted, glancing up fiercely.

Alex raised her hands up, palms forward, in surrender. “To those of us who spend most of our time in off-the-record operations, that can look pretty offensive. I don’t wear black because I think it’s the most superior colour or anything, I wear it because it’s significantly more difficult to shoot me dead with it on.”

That was... valid. Distantly valid, acceptable in the sense that she understood and respected the rationale but still wasn’t _quite_ able to accept people not enjoying something as wondrous as stretchy, iridescent silk. “Okay. That’s acceptable. So I am to wear this?”

“It’s meant to stretch out to fit anyone larger than myself, so, yes. It won’t weird you out and we won’t be ruining your...” Alex paused, glancing meaningfully over her bright-fuchsia shirt, wine-red chinos, and yellow high-tops. “...well, your clothes.” She finished lamely.

“Where would you like for me to change?” Addy asked, ignoring the awkward scrunch to Alex’s face. 

Alex just shrugged, moving towards the door. “In here is fine, I’ll shut the door and give you five minutes to get dressed in that. You can fold the rest of your clothes and we’ll put them in a box for you to change into later. That okay?”

Giving one last lingering look at the litany of vaguely dangerous looking unfinished projects, Addy shrugged. “I can’t see why not.”

* * *

Hank was outfitted differently to how he normally was. For starters, he had shed the heavy, police-style jacket, leaving a sleeveless t-shirt in its place which showed his arms. Below that was a thick and durable belt that held a pair of black, somewhat baggy military-style pants up, with the last remaining article of clothing being a pair of heavy combat boots, coloured black just like the rest.

Alex stood off to the side, next to the wall and well away from where the sparring would take place. She just looked at the two of them with something like curiosity and a little bit of smug anticipation. Addy wasn’t really sure how she read that off of her, but she did, and she didn’t trust it.

Hank finished stretching his arm above his head, easing himself back into a simple stance. “So, Administrator,” he began, reaching up to scratch at a stubbly chin. “Before we get into the exact details of your powers, it was decided we would see where you were at with basic hand-to-hand. Alex?”

The woman in question reached over to her right, flicking a single switch. The lights above them, previously white, faded into a dark, warm red, casting everything in a slight gloom. She could _feel_ the effects of it near instantly, the sudden inability to access stored power in her body’s cells. It wasn’t being depleted per-se, though the energy leak her body naturally had was still happening, it was just preventing her body from accessing that stored energy and using the various abilities it had naturally.

“This is a red sun lamp. We installed them after the Master Jailer incident so, in the event that Kara or you wished to spar without powers, you would not have to be exposed to potentially harmful amounts of radiation. You in particular were noted in our decision for this, as your response to kryptonite as a whole points towards there being possible long-term detrimental effects to exposure to it among Kryptonians.” He took a pause, glancing at her with a thoughtful look. “This spar is completely voluntary, Administrator. You can decide at any time to tap out or not to engage at all. We can move immediately on to discussions about your powers, if you feel the need. But, if at all possible, we would like to establish a baseline for what your physical skills are. Not abilities, _skills_.”

“Supergirl didn’t even really know how to throw a punch when she first started out,” Alex piped up, glancing wistfully into the middle distance. “Honestly, it’s only because she’s so durable that she didn’t break her thumb hitting Vartox in the chin.”

“Right,” Hank cut in, his voice steady. “So we want to ascertain your current skill levels in basic hand-to-hand, and to address and hopefully fix any issues so that one of my agents doesn’t have to spend the better part of a week ensuring her sister won’t break her hand if she hits someone without her powers.”

She’d figured it out. The radiation the lamps emitted was partially stifling her cells, preventing them from catalyzing the stored energy. It was fascinating, but it was also tremendously confusing, as a red sun and a yellow sun shouldn’t really be different outside of possible material composition and the amount of radiation they produce. The fact that it was merited further research, possibly into astrophysics. She’d never been a huge fan of the topic, especially when trying to look at how other species saw it, but she would bite the bullet to figure out even a percentage of the differences. “If I fight you, will this go quicker?”

Hank and Alex shared a look, one of those ones people occasionally did around her that she didn’t really _get_. “This spar probably won’t influence other tests one way or another, unless you can access your powers with it in place?”

“Some of them,” Addy confirmed, watching as Hank and Alex went still. “Just the ones which don’t come naturally to this body. I am unable to access them, the radiation from the red sun lamps interfere with my body’s ability to process the solar energy it has stored, despite how little of it there is. I imagine if I was given a large burst of yellow sun radiation in a short period of time, the solar energy in my cells would be able to be accessed for the duration that the excess was flooding through me, but that isn’t the case right now.”

“Right,” Hank said slowly, easing his gaze away from Alex. “This is supposed to be a fight without powers, so no telepathy, just hand-to-hand. Are you willing?”

Sort of. Taylor didn’t have much, if any, experience fighting handicapped like this, but she had a large array of knowledge about close-quarters-combat. It had been one of the things repeatedly drilled into her as a cape of her type, as a Master with specific minions she was reliant on. Others, like those who could generate blasts of energy for ranged projectiles, could still use their abilities in a pinch, but cut off from her swarm and in a one-on-one fight, Taylor would need to physically match her opponent and work around any powers they had until she could recollect a swarm and use that to augment her combat potential.

She wouldn’t be wasting any solar energy doing this, and they did seem relatively focused on her getting tested in this fashion. Glancing down at her outfit for a moment, the iridescent silk bodysuit that hugged her body, outlined all the corded muscle that had just sort of come with her new state of being, Addy gave the idea a bit of thought. It would make others happy, she would be doing good, and she possibly might even surprise or impress them.

Yes, she could comply with that much. “Okay.”

Alex eased one hand away from the switch, apparently ready to flick it off again at a moment’s notice, her arm coming to rest at her side. Hank, across from her, steadied himself into a relatively simple fighting stance, arms raised up, fists tight. It looked somewhat close to a boxer’s stance, but with a wider spread to his legs and his arms kept a little lower to allow for grabs. It did look solid, though.

Drawing on Taylor’s memories for this much wasn’t difficult. She’d learned the gamut of fighting styles, not to the degree where she was a _master_ in them or anything like that, but enough to fit various parts of the styles together. A lot of what she had learned, partially due to the PRT initially denying her access to the more directly violent alternatives, were things like Judo, Aikido, a lot of throws and grappling, something that was significantly less useful with only one arm.

Hank began to approach slowly, circling slightly to her left as he did. Addy adjusted, eased onto her heels and tightened her calves. No, for all that a lot of the PRT-mandated styles were less useful, it wasn’t like Taylor learned _nothing_ from Brian. She had learned plenty, and learned in a way that had emphasized the practical use of combat, less so the inherent artistic, spiritual, or philosophical purpose.

Jarring herself forward without flight was difficult, but not unmanageable. The Kryptonian DNA in her system had augmented her physical fitness to a near-inhuman peak, something that would’ve required a good portion of her daily life devoted to maintaining. She closed the distance between herself and Hank in just two long strides of her legs, and the man jolted a bit at that, raising his arms up, expecting a punch.

She whipped her leg back and then brought it forward in a sharp punt, directly into the gap below his knee. The front of her toes rang with the impact, a painful ache that spread out from the joints, but Hank got the worst of it, crumpling back as his arms lowered at the introduction of pain.

She lurched forward again, getting into his space. She was as tall as he was, if less heavy, but her reach was, at least, greater. Whatever he was expecting the follow-up to his mistake was, it probably wasn’t her bringing her stump around - the bodysuit’s sleeve tied off for the time being - and cracking it directly across the side of his head with enough force to make her shoulder hurt. Following his sideways jostle, she reached out with her hand, wrapped her fingers into a fist around the hem of his shirt, and used that to hold him in place while she unceremoniously drove her knee directly between his legs.

Hank crumpled with a noise of pain.

“Foul!” Alex yelled, sounding horrified.

Addy turned, stared blankly. “Fouls don’t exist in combat,” she pointed out.

“Fragile,” Hank croaked on the ground, rolling onto his side as he eased himself up a bit. He kept muttering under his breath low enough that Addy could only pick up on the occasional sound, and none of it sounded like any language she had catalogued. “Why are those so fragile.”

Alex rushed onto the stage, crouching down to help Hank to his feet. She kept shooting Addy scathing looks, ones that eventually dried up as Hank pointedly stared at Alex, looking less than impressed. “She fouled,” Alex muttered in turn, sounding almost petulant.

“She...” He took in a breath, visibly trying to compose himself. “She brings up a good point about fights not having fouls, Agent Danvers. But, yes, for the future, Administrator, hitting people in the genitals during friendly spars is thought of poorly by others. Try not to do it again.”

“Should we continue our spar?” Addy asked, wanting to get things moving.

““No!”” Alex and Hank said in sync, or, well, more _yelled_ than anything else. She was assuming they were the so-called ‘sore losers’ she could recall from Taylor’s memories. If they hadn’t wanted her to exploit an obvious vulnerability in their body, they should’ve worn protective gear to compensate for it.

“Then we should move on to my powers,” Addy explained very firmly. “Expediting this process would be of benefit to everyone here, as I wish to go home soon.”

“Just—” Hank started, wincing at some unseen pain. “Just, give us a minute to prepare. Alright?”

They would get their sixty seconds.

* * *

The room they brought her to next was a bit of a contrast. It had white walls made from what looked like durable concrete, and was occupied by herself, a metal table, a single bulb on a chain that creaked ominously, two fold-out chairs, and a delightful little drainage grate beside a raised, solid concrete platform. She wasn’t sure why those two were there, considering it didn’t have a sprinkler system or any reason to have a drainage system, but she was giving them props for effort.

Across from her, seated in the other chair, was Hank. After he’d sent Alex off to bring her here, he’d obviously changed out of his workout clothes. Now, instead, he was wearing what he normally did: that padded jacket, a black t-shirt, armoured pants, and even heavier looking combat boots. His face still flickered with pain every once and a while, but it was significantly less common than it had been for the first half-a-minute after she’d firmly trounced him in hand-to-hand combat.

Wiggling a bit in her chair, Addy glanced back towards the grate.

“Ignore that,” Hank said at last.

Addy didn’t. “What was it for?”

“This used to be a prison cell. We changed it into a simple room after we developed the alien-containing glass cages further into the base. That’s not what we’re here to talk about, however.” Hank shifted in his seat, his hands folded politely in front of him. “I need to ask you some straightforward questions about your telepathy.”

Addy turned back to him, pushing the curious thoughts about the grating into the back of her mind. “Ask away.”

“What are the limits?” He started, voice blunt.

There was that D.E.O. mentality she appreciated. “Existence, if not sentience. My power works by broadcasting through a psychic bandwidth directly into a target entity with degrees of influence. On simple-minded creatures, such as insects, it’s significantly less nuanced. They are already used to existing in something close to a hivemind, obeying simple commands, that sort of thing. The more aware something becomes, the more complicated the control is, the more feedback.” She paused for a moment, pursing her lips. “The limits contained within my abilities prevent me from interfacing with things which are close to the concept of mentally existing, but still don’t. Most plants, fungi, coral, technology that hasn’t reached a degree of self-awareness.”

“Could you control the hologram you were shown?” Hank asked.

Addy shook her head. “It’s an AI only in the sense that it’s complicated and has a degree of intellect and ability to respond and facilitate responses to things. It’s just a very clever computer.”

“But it worked on Indigo, as your report says,” Hank pointed out.

Addy ran through her memories. “Indigo was sufficiently sentient, and her people interfaced with technology under a similar set of psychic interactions that my own species interacted with each other. It was simple to adjust my powers to act as a way for her to ‘connect’ to me, and then assert control over her. Her kind are used to being the dominant mind in computers outside of their own kin. When they interface with something, they generally exert near or full control over it as their will dominates even burgeoning intelligences due to the vast size of it. She was not expecting something stronger than her mentally, and I believe she was actually expecting some sort of synthetic augmentation I had in my person which she could access and then cause to fail. I don’t believe she understood I was giving her access to my network until I had already prevented her from leaving.”

“Is this what you think?” Hank queried after a moment. “Or is there some sort of function that gives you an awareness over what you can possibly influence.”

“The latter,” Addy confirmed. “It’s a leftover from Taylor’s original ability to sense her bugs as an extension of herself. I simply rigged it to inform me of things which my psychic bandwidth can, for lack of a better term, ‘come into contact with’. I don’t always project my psychic abilities, I have them off now, but there’s enough presence there that I can... _feel_ things, for lack of a better term. I use it to help adjust my parameters to grant me control over them.”

There was a short, almost heavy pause.

“Can you control me?” He asked, at last.

It occurred to Addy that he probably didn’t realize she knew he wasn’t human at this point. She felt for him with that sense again, and she could feel him, but his presence was... _loud_ , for lack of a better term. She could adjust to attempt to overwhelm it, but unlike the Master Jailer, whose psychic immunity came from something that felt surmountable, she wasn’t totally sure she could take full control of Hank without needing to draw on her coreself resources. “I can,” she still said, because it was the truth. Given a worst-case scenario, she could subvert him.

Hank tensed, before relaxing. “I assumed, but didn’t have confirmation. Kara noted in her after-combat report for the Master Jailer that you managed to use up solar energy in using this ability, how does that work?”

“Well, my body now serves as a battery in a manner of speaking. I can access solar energy and rely on it to power the telepathic bandwidth, but it quickly runs out of energy.” She wasn’t a huge fan of that either, especially because it would seem Kara had several magnitudes more energy than she had, which didn’t entirely track with the purported ‘60% to 75% Kryptonian’ declaration towards her biology. It could be more complicated than that, of course, but she still wasn’t totally sure.

“Continuing on, you said you could control simple-minded creatures with ‘less influence’. Clarify that for me.”

That one was easier to go over. “Due to the limits put into place by my gestalt, my capacity to take control of individual creatures depends on several parameters. The bandwidth I have access to has to be adjusted to accommodate different aspects of control, such as how simple any one creature is, the variety among them, different brain structures, feedback from different sources, the degree of control I can impart onto them. Taylor, for example, I gave access to bugs; she had control over bugs for several blocks in a range around her, with the ability to receive feedback through their sight, hearing, and other senses. She had enough fine-detailed control to control each independently if she had wished. The reason why the range is so large is due to the fact that bugs are, regardless of species, generally very simple mentally, making the bandwidth requirement, even for something as wide in variety as ‘bugs’, very small, which allowed me to then offload most of the rest of the bandwidth into the sheer range she had.”

Hank stared for a long moment, lost in thought. “What would happen if you narrowed the species?” He asked, finally.

She ran a quick calculation. “If I reduced the bugs she could control down to simply hornets, for example, she would have a range of several miles at the least, if not more. City-wide, possibly. It depends on the insect, really; ants would be the better option in this instance because they’re so easy to interface with, and she could have some variety there without much needed bandwidth.”

“And you have access to this at any time?” Hank hedged.

Addy blinked slowly. “Of course I do. It’s me.”

Which did actually bring up something. She paused, hesitated, and maybe Hank saw it, maybe he was just silent, maybe nothing, but the conversation petered off. She fidgeted a bit, trying to work through the noise in her head, the conflicting thoughts. This was supposed to be power testing, supposed to be ensuring she wasn’t a threat. This wasn’t a place for personal matters, but she wasn’t sure she’d get another chance before she had to see Kara.

“Did I do something wrong yesterday?” She asked.

Hank froze for a moment, lips pursing. He was quiet, glancing off to the side, thinking. “You did and you didn’t. Do you understand why Kara has been avoiding you?”

“She was upset that I killed someone.” It was obvious.

Hank shook his head. “No, Administrator. Killing is... final, yes, and should only be done when necessary, and this did feel necessary. Indigo was an immediate threat to the continued wellbeing of our entire planet. Had she gotten access to the nuclear missiles in full and launched them at, say, another country, it is possible she could’ve thrown the entire planet into a nuclear war, regardless of how much President Marsdin might explain that it was a rogue alien intelligence. No, Kara looks to be mostly trying to process what you did and why you did it, alongside the fact that she _let_ you do it.”

“She didn’t let me do anything,” Addy said frankly, because she didn’t. She was her own person, she had agency, she was an _adult_. Kara could not boss her around any more than The Warrior could, and the cooling corpse of his avatar was in another dimension working from very different rules.

Hank smiled, and it was that same sad, sad smile that he showed her yesterday. “I don’t think she sees it that way, Administrator.”

“Why do you do that?” She demanded, her fingers tightening against the table.

Hank paused. “Do what?”

“That smile,” she said quickly. “It’s sad, why do you keep pointing it at me?”

That brought him up short again for a moment. “I understand the reason for killing other people,” he began slowly, the words soft. “But I don’t _like_ seeing people I care about kill others. For their own safety? I won’t lose sleep, I don’t lose sleep, but a kill is still a kill. It lingers, you might not have noticed it yet, you might even think you never will, but... I don’t like seeing you, Agent Danvers, or even Supergirl herself be forced to kill or maim. I would rather carry that burden, if it meant they could sleep well at night.”

That made sense, but not for her. She understood the point, but it clearly didn’t work with her. She wasn’t a shard anymore, but she also wasn’t _human_ either. Being able to psychically shred your enemies was a sign that she had all the proper defence systems in place. Guilt played no part in survival, that was simply the way of things for her.

Nothing would change that.

“So how I did it was wrong?” She asked, finally, pushing the topic to the side.

Hank shrugged. “Honestly, in some way, yes. To her, as a Kryptonian, enslavement, whether physical or psychic, is a revolting concept. Then, upon failing to make her willingly enslave herself to you and Kara, you opted to attempt to consume her mind. She killed herself as a result, to avoid that. That is not something she probably agrees with; killing her outright is one thing, harvesting her for excess information or attempting to enslave her is another.”

Addy felt her face pinch, brows wrinkling. “But she had resources. Had I just killed her, I would’ve wasted them.” Even now, while she processed the information she had gained from Indigo, she had come out of things with more knowledge than she’d started with. She understood Coluan existence far better, and she had a decent grasp on a handful of interstellar species that oftentimes employed Coluans. It wasn’t much, but it _was_ something.

“Had you just killed her, it would’ve been the humane choice if the alternative was your other options,” Hank pointed out matter-of-factly.

That _still_ didn’t apply to her. “I’m not human,” she reminded.

“Neither is Kara,” Hank pointed out. “What we consider _humanity_ , compassion, ethics and morals—yes, a lot of them _are_ cultural constructs for humans. There are aliens out there which eat their dead and it is considered sacred to do so, but cannibalism among humans is taboo for any number of reasons. While most of them _are_ cultural, some of them I hope are more immutable. Goodness is not inherent in people, aliens or otherwise, but many aliens see torture or enslavement just as Kara herself does. People are more than just resources, to be portioned out.”

Addy couldn’t find something to say in response to that.

* * *

Peeling out of the iridescent suit was both a good and a bad thing. It was good, in that she had long since felt like her mood no longer properly matched up with its constantly changing colours, but it was bad because she still really enjoyed the texture of it, to the point where it was almost preferable to her current clothes.

Almost, being the key word.

Alex and Hank had left as a pair to go and set up the briefing on some alien threat they were going to attempt to take down, leaving her with Susan Vasquez to chaperone her around to get her clothes. It hadn’t taken long to get to the changing room, and it’d taken her even less time to slip back into her chinos and t-shirt, though she had struggled a bit getting the zipper on the bodysuit down her spine with only one arm.

She’d managed it without asking for Susan’s help, but then she wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable with Susan touching her. That she had people who were allowed to touch her was a simple and efficient concept, really. Kara, Alex and Hank were all allowed to touch her, some more than others, but strangers could come with weapons - and more to the point she liked them significantly less - and while Susan had long since become more of an acquaintance, she wasn’t really sure she would feel comfortable in close proximity to her.

Reluctantly dropping the bodysuit into the box that had previously housed her clothes, she folded the cardboard flap over the top and tucked it beneath her stump, keeping it in place with enough force to bend the material of the box somewhat. Ambling over to the door, Addy pressed the single red button beside it, prompting it to slip open with a quiet _hiss_.

Susan, staring at the screen of her phone, glanced up briefly, meeting her eyes. “Oh you’re done, thank god,” she breathed out, tucking her phone back into her pants. “Box?”

Addy pulled it out from beneath her stump and held it out at an arm’s length. Susan gave her another one of those looks she still couldn’t decipher before gently taking it from her, passing it over into her left hand and tucking it up against her chest like how one might partially cradle a baby. “You ready to head back?”

“I have been since I arrived,” Addy said honestly.

Susan snorted. “Yeah, this place can be _kinda_ dreary, not going to lie to you. Anyway, I’ll lead the way. Hank and Alex should still be doing their briefing on the alien they’re trying to take down.”

Turning, Susan stepped into a stride that Addy found herself having to actually work to keep pace with. Not that it was difficult, she was easily a head taller than Susan and her legs were significantly longer, but still she did feel some fondness that Susan didn’t try to accommodate her by slowing down like some of the others did.

They walked in silence for the most part. Addy wasn’t terribly invested in their current alien case, and more to the point hadn’t been invited to come along for it. She was apparently in something like limbo, as far as Hank had been willing to say. She’d done enough that she’d caught the attention of people who looked for that sort of thing, but not so much that she was regularly fetching snakes out of trees. She both had eyes on her and was a complete unknown, and to an extent they wanted to keep it that way.

For what it was worth, Addy didn’t really feel like she wanted to spend her days doing menial tasks either. That much they could agree on.

“—almost. An alien is their weapon,” Hank’s voice said, becoming more and more clear as they got closer. They cleared the archway that separated the hallway to the main mission area just in time to see Hank press his fingers into his watch, the screen behind him ringing out as it brought up a window of a single figure. The figure in question was human in the abstract, but heavily misshapen, resembling someone after being stung by a small swarm of bees, with swollen features and one eye replaced by a piece of ocular tech.

“A K’Hund,” Hank continued, glancing back at the screen for a moment before turning to the amassed group of agents and, just barely visible behind them, her legs kicked up on the table as she leaned back in the chair, Kara. She was dressed in her Supergirl outfit, and appeared to be busy fiddling with her nails. “Stronger than your average Fort Rozz escapee. Now, we’ve obtained intel on their next heist but we have to move fast. Lucky for us, we have an alien of our own.”

Everyone, including Hank, turned to stare at Kara.

The woman in question took a moment to realize she was the focus of everyone’s attention. “Hm?” She less vocalized, more hummed, glancing back towards her nails after another moment.

“I’m sorry Supergirl, am I boring you?” Hank asked blandly, voice feigning at neutrality.

Kara’s face scrunched up, almost looking baffled. “Only boring people get bored,” she shot back, not taking her eyes off of her hand as she adjusted to be a bit more comfortable with her legs propped up.

Addy noticed Alex’s face cramp, something like concern washing over it as she shared a look with Hank.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were talking about the other alien agent at the D.E.O.,” Kara said airily, her eyes snapping over to where Addy was with something almost bordering on hostility. She didn’t like it. “Considering that’s all that anyone at CatCo was talking about today. The _new_ hero, or at least the new _super_ , caught flying over the city like a hummingbird.” Almost as though for emphasis, she kicked a bit off of the table, sending her rolling chair into a few easy spins.

Throughout it all, her stare remained fixed on Addy.

Hank, either sensing the tension or just knowing better, shook his head. “Administrator will not be coming on this mission,” he said frankly. “But you will, Supergirl.”

The spinning slowed to a halt, Supergirl staring at Hank with eyes heavily lidded.

Hank just glanced up in what had been obviously an aborted eye-roll. “Alright everyone!” He announced, the agents around him jolting to attention. “Let’s move, let’s move.”

The agents, Alex included, swarmed past her, off towards the changing rooms in big clumps. There was a low murmur of discussion feeding into the background, Addy just barely managing to pick up a “Supergirl” here, a “bad day?” there. Nothing concrete, but it wasn’t as though the interaction had been subtle.

The only one not to fully leave was Alex, who slowed to a halt just next to her.

“Do I need to brief you again or have you got all that?” Hank asked, sounding unimpressed.

Kara finally rose from her seat, head bowed back, looking completely exasperated. “Kick. Alien. Ass.”

Then she was gone, vanishing around the corner.

Addy glanced down at her hand. It was trembling.

Alex’s hand, slowly, moving directly through her line of vision, came to rest on it. “I’m sorry about Kara,” she said gently, her touch was grounding.

“She was like that this morning,” Addy found herself saying, not really sure what she was feeling. She was feeling a _lot_ , though. Too much. “Angry.”

Alex sighed, smoothing her thumb over her knuckles. “She—I haven’t really seen her like this, not since she was really small and upset about cultural differences, but I promise Addy, she’ll be better. I’ll talk to her, but she doesn’t hate you, okay? She doesn’t hate me or you, I know that much.”

Addy glanced down at her, managing to force herself to meet Alex’s eyes. “How do you know?”

Alex’s face softened, warmed. “I’m her sister, Addy.” Her fingers left her hand, arm falling back to her side as she began to step backwards and towards the changing rooms. “I just know, alright?”

She wasn’t so sure.

* * *

She couldn’t bring herself to go home. It was a foreign experience, like ants crawling over her skin at the concept of waiting there for Kara to return, to being there in the moment. She was hurt, she had realized sometime into her flight over, and it was... _weighing_ on her, for lack of a better term. It was a pressure in her chest that grew the closer she got to the apartment, to where her laptop and her things were, where she was normally safe.

So she hadn’t gone there.

Al’s Dive Bar was strikingly familiar to Somer’s Rock, or at least it was in the abstract. It was, in every definition of the word, a hole-in-the-wall, tucked away between larger buildings and almost purposefully hidden from view. The front door wasn’t even conventional, and rather it was a metal thing with a slotted opening near the top for people to peek through. It radiated that very same sort of shadiness that she’d come to associate with Taylor’s couple of months as a cape in Brockton, a seedy underbelly of a sort.

She glanced down at her hand again, at her clothes, and then back up at the door. She’d been here for a while, though how long wasn’t entirely clear. She’d just been staring at the door, not particularly sure what to do with herself. She both wanted to go home, to tuck herself into her pyjamas and read more about crystals, but at the same time felt that she couldn’t. She felt like an intruder, something out of place.

She felt wrong. Unhappy. Again.

Breathing in, Addy steadied her mind, collected herself, and brought her hand down on the door for three hard knocks. The metal creaked a bit under the assault, and she left a pretty obvious scuff mark, but she wasn’t really paying much attention to it.

After a moment, the metal slot flicked open and eyes peered at her from the other side. “Password?” A male voice asked, rough and low.

“Dollywood,” she replied.

A series of clunks, the sound of someone pulling locks out of place, echoed loudly before, with a tug, the door pulled itself open.

Al’s Dive Bar was just about what you’d expect inside as it was out. The place was poorly lit, dim in a purposeful way, and primarily filled up by tough-looking wooden chairs and metal tables that had been bolted into the gritty, sticky-looking green floor. The few sources of light that were present were clustered near the bar itself, which dominated the center of the room and was outfitted with a large number of different bottles, most of which she was pretty sure weren’t human in make.

There was a bit of a crowd present, though not too many. A black-haired Latino woman in one of the booths was attempting to push her tongue down a dark-skinned, orange-haired woman’s throat, a woman with pupils resembling those of a lizard was valiantly trying to chug a glass of liquid down faster than the large, green-skinned amphibian-like alien across from her, while a crowd of about eight to nine people cheered them on.

“You comin’ in?” The voice asked again, and Addy glanced around to find herself nearly eye-to-eye with a heavily bearded redhead whose stature resembled a fridge more than it did anything else.

Addy fidgeted, avoiding his gaze. “I’m looking for Carol?”

The man’s face didn’t soften, but he did seem to relax. “Near the back,” he grunted, motioning vaguely towards it. “Get goin’. Need to close this before the heat gets out.”

Addy wasn’t really sure how that was relevant, seeing as it was currently room temperature outside, but opted not to comment and nodded, passing by the burly man and focusing on her goal: finding Carol.

That didn’t turn out to be difficult. She found her almost immediately, tucked away at the side of the bar with another woman near her. The other woman was dark-skinned but warm-toned, with wavy black hair that had been cut into a pixie cut. She smiled in response to something Carol said, though it was subdued.

Addy picked up her pace, passing by the crowd of hooting and hollering onlookers as the woman with the weird eyes finished her glass off first.

“Carol?” Addy called out, pitching her voice to carry.

Carol jolted, turning around to glance at her. She still looked the same, the same pale skin accompanied by freckles, the same off-red hair, though she had it tied back into a bun at the crown of her head. Her face lit up, a low murmur of psychic interference brushing over her, and this time she didn’t bat it away, let it reach out to her. Addy watched Carol visibly relax until, finally, the psychic probe departed, pulled back into Carol.

“You came!” Carol said at last, smiling brightly. “You here for that free drink? It’s the least I can do, all things considered.”

Addy shook her head. She had learned much from Taylor, but chief among them was that drinking her problems away was not an effective method of coping with her issues. “No, I... need to ask about something. I didn’t want to go home.”

Carol’s face softened. “Hey, Megan—”

“I’ll cover for you,” Megan - apparently - said, waving her off. “Feel free to bring her out back. I’m gonna man the bar to stop some moron from _stealing when I can obviously see it!_ ”

There was a yelp, then a crash as something shattered against the floor. Megan breathed out, a low, put-upon sigh, and marched towards the cowed, half-crouched amphibian that had just been attempting to out drink someone. He looked terrified.

“I never caught your name,” Carol said, her attention drawn back in. She was making her way towards another door, one that had been propped open by a rock wedged between it and the door frame surrounding it.

Addy followed after. “I’m Addy,” she said simply.

Carol made a low noise in her throat, bracing her shoulder against the door as she forced it open. “It’s okay if you want to tell me if you went by something else in your species, or not. God knows, I might’ve lucked out with my name but I realize some people prefer the ones they take on when on other planets than they do their original.”

“I would prefer not to,” Addy agreed, getting her first glimpse of the space beyond the door. It was a fenced-in region, with several odd-looking plants sequestered away in pots, with benches interspersed throughout. She could faintly smell nicotine in the air, and it wasn’t hard to find the dying embers on the ground, where someone had dropped a cigarette butt and didn’t bother to stub it out with their shoe.

“That’s fine. What species are you anyways? If you feel comfortable saying,” Carol asked, making her way over to one of the benches and, with great drama, turning around and slumping into it with a sigh, her back braced against the chainlink fence.

Addy didn’t need to think much about it. “I’m a Shardite,” she said simply. Pertinent information was probably necessary for this conversation, and she needed a second opinion. She trusted Alex, trusted _Kara_ , but... she had to be sure.

“Haven’t heard of it,” Carol said simply.

Addy nodded. “That’s intentional.”

“Huh, it’s been a while since we had a secret species hanging around,” Carol replied offhandedly, fishing around in the pocket of her pants with one hand while the other snatched an abandoned lighter off of the other end of the bench.

She was confused. “A what?”

Carol freed a packet of cigarettes with a crow of triumph, popping the lid open with her thumb while she plucked one of them from inside. “Definitely new, then. Generally, the intergalactic community outside of formal environments views species in three categories.” She paused, sticking the cigarette between her lips and, with a flick of her thumb, lighting the end. She inhaled, then puffed out, and Addy stepped several feet to the side to get further away from the awful scent. Why did people even like those? “The first are so-called open species. Those are species which are open about their existence to other space-faring civilizations, and generally intermingle. The second is isolationist species—ones who don’t openly broadcast or generally intermingle in galactic communities, but aren’t exactly hiding either. Finally is the so-called secret species, or secretive species, depending on who you ask. They’re basically species which, despite likely being aware of other alien species existing, and likely having the technology to engage with and converse with them, do everything in their power to hide their existence, usually through limiting communication and setting up dead zones in their solar system to prevent people from picking up errant signals.”

Addy watched Carol take another drag on her cigarette, a billow of smoke escaping the side of her mouth.

“My species, Titanian, are considered an isolationist species. We don’t broadcast that we exist, but we’re willing to be diplomatic with our neighbours, just we generally don’t leave the planet. Green Martians, back when they were alive, were an open species, and the White Martians, which now control Mars, are an isolationist species, built on the xenophobic idea that they’re superior to everyone else.” Carol paused at that, though, jostling some of the ash off near the end of the cigarette and onto the ground. “But that’s not really what you’re here for, is it?”

Addy slowly, but surely, shook her head. “No. That’s interesting, and I will endeavour to ask further questions, but no.”

“Troubles at home? Boyfriend, maybe a girlfriend?” Carol asked simply.

Addy couldn’t help the face she made. “No.”

“Neither’s fine too,” Carol was quick to assure, though there was something like laughter in the back of her voice. “So, home troubles, but unrelated to romance. Roommate upset with you or something?”

Addy hesitated, opened her mouth, then shut it. “Yes. She is also an alien, and I did something which upset her. Not that I did it at all, but rather the way I did it.”

“Cultural exchange can be messy like that,” Carol mused offhandedly, shaking her head after a moment. “Care to go into more detail? You don’t have to, but it might help.”

She tried to work the thoughts in her head into something coherent but not too revealing, something that would be parsed without giving away too much. “I did something that would, to my roommate, be considered an acceptable break in moral codes in the circumstance it happened. However, the way I went about doing it upset her, and now she is being... aggressive, and mean.” That wasn’t enough, though, because that didn’t capture the full picture. “She normally isn't like that, though. This is a very intense change in personality, something she did not display for a similar moral quandary she faced earlier on. She just ate more ice cream then, but now she’s being hostile.”

Carol took another moment to take a drag off of her cigarette, pursing her lips as she glanced up into the sky. It had been dark out when she arrived, and now was no different. Still, light pollution left the area feeling closer to late evening than nighttime, and she couldn’t see any stars, no matter how hard she tried to follow Carol’s gaze.

“I think you need to try to find a common ground, in that case,” Carol said at last, finally snubbing the cigarette out on the surface of the bench next to her. “There must be some differences between your situation and the one you observed, and if you can figure out what those details _are_ , you might be able to find and talk about it. That’s kinda what you really have to do here, cultural exchange is, again, _messy_ , and dialogue is really the only way to get through it without getting into a fist-fight. Do you think you did anything wrong in that instance?”

Something twisted in her stomach, but the guilt, shame, the anguish, the things Hank told her she might eventually feel, they still didn’t come. There was that squirmy discomfort, the discomfort that kept bringing the feeling of Taylor’s mind shredding into frayed strands to the forefront of her consciousness, but nothing more. “No. I did what I had to.”

Carol shrugged. “Then there you go. If all else fails, keep that close to your chest and maybe you’ll figure things out. But, really, try to talk with her. I know you can do it.”

It was nice being told as much. “Thank you.”

“Hey, no problem. You saved me from having to shatter a guy’s kneecaps with my bare hands and out myself because he couldn’t take a hint, let alone _no_ , for an answer.” Slipping the carton of cigarettes back into her pants, Carol hauled herself to a stand with a loud, breathy sigh. “I should probably go make sure Megan hasn’t dismembered that Grik for breaking a bottle of Glirell spirits.”

Carol stepped forward, making her way towards Addy - and by extension, the door behind her - before pausing. “Actually, do you mind if I write something on your hand?”

Addy blinked. “As long as it is not permanent.”

Carol tugged a pen out of the pocket opposite to the one she’d had her cigarettes in, approaching with steady strides. Addy held out her hand for her take, which she did, and flipped over so her palm was facing down. She quickly jotted down a string of numbers separated by dashes.

“This,” she said, tucking the pen away again. “Is my phone number. I work here as a side-gig to experience alien culture and, y’know, free booze. I won’t always be here, even though you’re always welcome at Al’s, god only knows we could use some genuinely peaceful people. The point is, find a place to write that down, or add it to your phone, or _whatever_ , and contact me if you need me. I can’t say I’ll be awake at all times, but leave a text or a message and I’ll probably get back to you.”

Addy stared at her hand a little longer, and Carol didn’t wait for her, passing right by and back into the noisy confines of the bar.

Maybe Cat Grant was right.

She might need a cellphone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, writing this made my brain leak out of my ears. I somehow managed to do that in one sitting, honest to god. Anyway, I took a lot of inspo on Kryptonian crystals from Smallville (which I still love, even with all of its really, really weird flaws) and other stuff.
> 
> I forgot to mention last chapter, but chapter 10 is pretty much the mid point for this season and where the big canon derail happens (in that Indigo is very much dead and not coming back). But, still, we've got bases to cover in the meantime.
> 
> I think the 'i' on my keyboard is going to shit. Does anyone know how to tell if that's the case?


	14. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes to work early.

The CatCo building felt somehow different at 5:14AM. There was no suitable reason for it, outside of the absence of many of the people who worked there, not that she paid them much attention to begin with. There was something distantly unreal in quality about the unlit offices, the long stretches of hallway that went on and on and on, all without foot-traffic. Drawing from Taylor’s memories had provided the anecdote that the environment felt very _dream-like_ , which was pertinent information, seeing as her brain appeared to be functionally incapable of remembering dreams to make her own comparison.

Reaching forward, Addy pressed her thumb into the button, glimpsing up at the little LED screen that showed the closest one to her was making its descent of nearly thirteen floors. Glancing back around, she noticed a few other stragglers. A man yawning sleepily into his sleeve as he white-knuckled a small book, its spine ready to break under the pressure, a woman, gently soothing a thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose, eyes shut in pain.

The world was quiet, dark. The tall windows to her right, giving a line of sight over the inner-city roads, let very little light in, just the faint colours that caught on the far horizon. The sun wouldn’t rise yet for half-an-hour, and most people wouldn’t be waking up for hours after that.

The elevator made a little _ding!_ as it arrived, doors peeling open to reveal the reflective gold interior. Easing her laptop bag’s strap further up her nape, Addy stepped in, pressing the button to her workplace as she went, before turning back around just in time to watch the elevator doors ease shut.

There was a short lurch, then ascent.

She’d arrived back home sometime after midnight to a still-empty apartment. Kara was still out, doing whatever Kara did, and she’d been left to her lonesome to do her nightly ritual and fall asleep thereafter with little fanfare. Bucking the trend, however, her body had obstinately decided to wake her up several times throughout the night, and she’d gotten frustrated enough that, after her sixth awakening and roughly 4 hours of sleep, she’d decided to truly get up. It was four in the morning, and that was about as close as she knew she was going to manage.

Of course, that had been a bad decision. Kara had come home by then, her breathing steady and relaxed, tucked away in the wrinkled confines of her blankets. Addy had spent some time staring at her, breathing quietly, from the couch, trying to process the change in personality, the hostility, the dismissal. With those thoughts had come discomfort, a need to be elsewhere, identical to the one that had driven her to go and find Carol. It had gotten so tremendously bad that, after jotting down a short note to Kara to ensure she wouldn’t assume the worse, she’d gotten dressed - red chinos, white shirt, blue high-tops, her wine-red pageboy hat, and a red thin sweater with a passing resemblance to a poncho in construction - gotten her things, and left.

Combined with the fact that getting work started now would ease the amount she had to do, Addy had thought it rational to avoid the discomfort and simply do something else. That she would spend hours wasting perfectly good fight-or-flight inducing chemicals on someone who was very much asleep felt like a mistake, and there was nothing more to it than that.

Carol’s idea of having a conversation with Kara about cultural barriers was something for later. Not in the morning, or at night, but when both of them were aware and conscious and maybe in an environment where there were people nearby to arbitrate if it came down to it

Another _ding!_ and the doors peeled open into the surprisingly lit interior of CatCo’s main office space. Not all of the overhead lights were on, of course, but someone had clearly already arrived and set things up.

The person in question, as it would happen, was Winn. He hadn’t noticed her arrival, his back hunched and shoulders raised as he muttered quickly to himself, typing away on the keyboard at a pace that Addy found _almost_ impressive. Exceptional hand-eye coordination would be required for something like that, it wasn’t hard to tell, though he could still definitely do with some improvements to his situational awareness. Leaving his wallet around, not noticing obvious audio cues, being too focused—he had much to learn if he wanted to really improve his security.

Plodding forward, past the various unoccupied desks where people would soon occupy, Addy arrived at her seat, pulled it out, and lowered herself down into it.

Winn, still too focused to be aware, continued rapidly typing. His muttering was growing more defensive, like he was getting into an argument with something.

Leaning over, Addy eased her thumb into the power button on her computer tower, slipping out of the embrace of her laptop bag and easing the entire thing up just to the left of her keyboard.

The screen flicked on, showing the loading screen for the operating system.

Then, finally, the speakers connected to her computer gave a shout as the loud - considering how quiet it was elsewhere, no sound waves to interfere with its arrival - delightful Windows 10 Professional jingle played.

Winn shrieked, voice reaching hitherto unheard-of heights for the man, and toppled backwards, his rolling chair going with him as he landed on his back.

Addy stared at him from the gap between his monitor and his tower, and Winn stared back. Neither of them quite made eye-contact, but the realization of who she was - not an intruder - played over his face rapidly. He looked, at first, just startled, then somewhat irritated, before a blotchy red colour rose to his cheeks, his ears, crawled its way down the front of his throat like she’d seen happen to Kara that one time when Lucy had brought up her devotion towards powerful women.

“Addy?” Winn finally asked, voice a breathy croak.

Satisfied with his acknowledgement of her existence, she glanced back towards her computer and quickly typed in the 33-letter combination of words that would get around the security failures of purely ‘randomized’ passwords. “Good morning, Winn,” she said at last as her desktop loaded into view, already switching from keyboard to mouse to pop open some of the diagnostic programs and the left-over homework she had been working on. Python, as it would happen, was a wonderfully _comprehensible_ language, unlike some she could, but would not, mention.

“It’s... jeez, Addy. 5:30? In the morning? What are you doing here?”

She didn’t look away from the ongoing scan. “I wish to continue my work,” she announced, because that _was_ true. It was also a deflection, but she had come to learn she could be willfully ignorant of such things if she just tried hard enough.

“You scared the shi—oot out of me,” Winn continued, nearly babbling. “I was just—hey, wait, aren’t you going to ask why I’m in here so early?”

That, however, did drag her eyes away. She squinted at him for a moment, taking him in. Winn was wearing his normal collection of clothes: a soft-looking cardigan thrown over a white dress shirt, black slacks held up by a belt, and polished dress shoes. His hair wasn’t that out of place, and considering he had just taken a tumble, she could forgive him for that much. He didn’t appear to have been staying here all night, which meant he’d come in earlier.

Glancing back just in time for the diagnostic program to begin spitting out lines of information, Addy shrugged. “I assumed your work ethic, like mine, drove you to arrive here early.”

She could feel Winn just _staring_ at her. There was some shuffling, a muttered “ _scary_ ” and the accompanying sound of him lifting his chair back into place before, at last, finally sitting back down.

“Well, no. I actually came in about... an hour ago?” He said, hands returning to his keyboard and beginning their percussive, clacky input. “Indigo, the crazy bi— _lue alien!_ Blue alien. Indigo the blue alien, I mean, left some, uh, presents. For all of us.”

Odd. Winn appeared to be suffering from worse speech patterns than normal. “Have you recently experienced a traumatic head injury?” She asked.

“...No, Addy. I’m just trying to be, uh, polite. It’s not that it’s you, I don’t think you care if I swear?”

“I do not.”

“Yeah, right. But uh, I talk really differently when I’m alone?” Winn let out a nervous chuckle that died off into a weak noise in the pit of his chest. “I blame it on most of my socialization as a kid being whatever I could get on the internet. That and voice chat in video games. Anyway, I kinda, uh, have to change how I talk? Or else I’ll get fired for calling a virus or something a bad word.”

“Social etiquette is important,” Addy agreed distractedly, tilting her head to one side. The error she was getting for one of the partitions on the server seemed to imply someone had done physical damage to it but not quite enough to break it.

Winn said nothing in return, slipping back into an amicable silence, his muttering growing once again. That wasn’t unusual, of course, it was how Winn processed things. He muttered to himself, talking in circles to work through issues, engaging in conversation with what he called “rubber ducks”, even though none existed within a hundred feet of CatCo as a result of a ban instituted by Cat due to what Winn had heavily implied was “unacknowledged childhood trauma”.

Personally, she just thought Cat disliked the sound of them. That or she was doing it to spite Winn, either was equally possible.

“I believe we’ll need to call in a repair technician,” Addy announced finally. Winn perked up a bit at that, leaning forward as she reached over to swivel her monitor around, giving Winn a look at her screen. His face pinched for a moment as he scanned over the contents.

“Yeah, probably. I hope someone didn’t leave ice cream in the server room again ‘for convenience’. The last one who did was nearly fired _out of a cannon_ , or would’ve if Miss Grant could find one, before Kara had managed to talk her down from the murder ledge and just to conventional firing.” Slumping back down into his chair, Winn raked a hand through the tangly curls that framed his head, fingers catching on snags that brought a wince to his face. “God, I really hope that isn’t the case. I’d go and check, but Cat is the only one with the keys outside of board members and none of them will be in for hours.”

Addy did her best not to go still at the mention of Kara, working through the remainder of the check-ups she had to do for the various bits of incredibly fragile technology that made CatCo the multimedia presence it very much was.

“...Actually Addy, uh, speaking of.” Winn fidgeted a bit, his fingers going still on his keyboard. “I heard about how you, like, uh, might’ve _mind-melded_ with Indigo?” He leaned forward and all but whispered the word ‘mind-melded’, despite the two of them being the only ones on the floor.

Even then, it wasn’t a totally accurate descriptor. Melding with another consciousness was something her species was adroit at, she was as much a combination of smaller parts as she was an individual. The capacity to adapt into new entities depending on the sometimes random fusing of dispirit pieces was something they’d all had to be particularly good at to avoid errors and self-destruction.

“...In a manner of speaking.” She tried, at last. Because explaining all of that to Winn felt like a bad idea. Whether because it would make him distracted or because it would weird him out again, it didn’t matter. She wanted neither. Winn was at his best when he was carelessly trying to be nice and friendly and at his worst when he looked at her like he wasn’t sure if she would do something wrong at a moment’s notice.

“Maybe you could help me figure this out?” He replied awkwardly, glancing away. “It’s just that, uh, I’m kinda worried we’re going to get another STUXNET, just this time instead of the US military being... er, the US military, this is going to indiscriminately target the hardware of basically every media company? On the globe?”

Pausing for a moment, Addy reached out to her coreself. The process of recombining what information she had obtained from Indigo was a slow one. Despite the relatively small amount of information - in comparison to what she could have obtained - it was vast in actual storage size. The Coluan did not particularly bottleneck themselves with low file sizes, in any event, and by extension the process of finding where the fragments fit together in that information was tedious and long-coming. She had, at this point, salvaged enough to know more about the Coluan mental architecture than she should as a being who wasn’t one, but had made little headway in the non-vital data packets.

“I apologize,” she said at last, blinking back to the present. “If you still need my help in three-to-five weeks, I may be able to help, but currently due to my power-saving state, the processing power for what data I salvaged is limited. I am still working through the core system information.”

Winn slumped back with a sigh, breathing noisily out through his nose. “Right. Right. Time to be a hero without a cape, I guess.”

* * *

“Addy?”

Blinking, she glanced away from Twitter and up to Winn. His face was pinched, awkward, eyes flicking up to a place just behind her head.

“I think you need to uh, see this,” he said, pointing.

Following the direction of the gesture, Addy blinked. There was Kara, strutting out from _Cat’s_ elevator. She was dressed even more unlike her normal self, a black sleeveless top that hugged her figure, accompanied by a black skirt with odd, triangular designs and with big, bulky sunglasses thrown over her eyes. Tucked into one arm was her purse, and clutched in her hand was a tall cup of coffee. Her heels were tall and looked almost spiked, a decision she might agree with - clothing which could double as a weapon was always a benefit - if not for the general atmosphere she was exuding.

Quietly, it occurred to her that Kara was... worse. Before there had been a lot of anger that slipped out from beneath how Kara normally acted, but there was still Kara beneath it all. Now, though? She walked differently, confidently, back straight and shoulders spread apart. Her lips, twisted into a narrow frown, spread into a hard smile as people turned to boggle at her. Though whether it was because she came out of Cat’s elevator or the fact that she was wearing what she was, it wasn’t clear.

Winn stumbled around his desk before rushing towards her.

Addy pulled her eyes away and back to Twitter, idly focusing on the video of a woman in a festive, red-and-black outfit with a tall, sceptre-like object which played a tune on a bell, led a long line of geese. She marched with her legs high, and she had a whistle clenched between her teeth, though her face was anything but hostile. She looked happy.

So did the geese.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Cat’s voice cut in. Addy jolted, not expecting it, and turned, only to find the woman not next to her desk, but rather at Kara’s.

Wordlessly, Kara held the cup out. “Your latte, Miss Grant,” she said.

Miss Grant took it, glancing down at it. She’d arrived earlier today, though not so early it had just been her, Winn, and Cat there. She had still given Addy a long, probing look, but hadn’t commented on her arriving so early otherwise. “Oh,” she said at last, though there was nothing in her tone that made Addy think she was particularly soothed.

“Walking from the main elevator takes an extra 90 seconds, which means your latte is 90 seconds colder,” Kara continued, undaunted and completely uncowed by Miss Grant’s tuxedoed presence. Again, more differences.

Cat took a long, long drink, her throb bobbing, before, finally, she let the cup come to rest at her side. “Brazen,” she said, sounding almost intrigued. “That’s a new colour on you. I don’t mind it.”

Kara’s face split into a self-satisfied smile—

“Yet.” Cat interrupted, voice dropping, going cold. “Don’t wear it out.”

—which fell off of her face just as quick, replaced by something not unlike frustration. Cat had already turned away by then, taking another drink of her cup as she walked with sure steps back into her office.

“Yikes,” Winn muttered, folding his hand over his eyes.

Addy clicked onto the next link that had been shared with her by an anonymous Twitter user by the name of “tothe_max19”. This one was of a small family of geese cuddling together in what looked like the tattered, bloodied remains of someone’s shirt. Victory spoils, a conquest they were using to the best of their own benefit. She could appreciate that, and retweeted it with commentary to match.

“Hey, Addy.”

She felt herself stiffen, tabbing off of Twitter. She craned her head around, watched Kara grow ever-closer. She’d traded her sunglasses out for her normal glasses at some point, leaving the tinted eyewear tucked into the hem of her shirt. Her expression was distant, cold. Not Kara.

Addy swallowed. “Good morning, Kara.” She replied, flicking her eyes back to her computer. She had nothing to do, Winn had told her to take an early lunch break before they’d start looking into more information about Python. She’d taken to it well, he said, and he was trying to encourage her to become _really_ good at it.

“You weren’t around this morning,” she said, voice airy, a conversational tone with none of the warmth. “I saw the note, sure, but why didn’t you stick around?”

Addy didn’t answer. She wouldn’t be able to tell a lie, not a convincing one. She knew that. Flicking her eyes up, she caught sight of Winn cringing away from the two of them, his face tight and awkward, looking anywhere else.

Kara’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, the grip too tight to be pleasant.

Addy felt herself stiffen further. This was not like Kara, Kara wouldn’t disobey her boundaries, Kara would be nice. Kara was wrong, she was twisted. If Kara had been like this normally, she would’ve figured it out by now. But she wasn’t, Kara was nice.

But Kara was different.

She had to find out why.

“Nothing to say?” Kara said, not quite asking.

Addy reached out to her powers, tightened the range down to skin-to-skin. Kryptonians felt like static to her, unreadable in most cases, but felt. She figured it was interference from the radiation they stored in their bodies, not some sort of innate defence against psychic abilities. It wasn’t insurmountable, and it wasn’t something that protected against mind control, but it did make getting workable information out of them difficult.

“Because you normally have so much to talk about,” Kara continued on, unhindered. Her grip tightened.

Addy didn’t need to think about it. If Kara was wrong, she would find out why, and that meant drawing from her coreself. She felt a year burn up in the instant she reactivated several bandwidth nodes, her power filling out, becoming louder. She shoved it towards Kara, adjusting for Kryptonian physiology, mapping it somewhat off of hers and building from what the information she received brought back. The static emanating from Kara warped the data, twisted it, overwhelmed the probe.

She pushed more years worth of power into it. She was up to twenty now, the static was balking.

“Come on, Addy,”— _red, anger, unclear, clarity too low, more energy_ —“I’m just _worried_ ”— _bright, striking, the static peeled away, dwarfed by the sheer interference of her own bandwidth. Intent bled through, all violence, so much hate. So loud, ringing in her ears. She could feel it bleed into her, the connection hijacked, the world tinted painfully red for just a moment_ —“about you.”

Addy reeled, unable to help it. The connection snapped, the film of anger and hate that had come to twist around her throat going with it. She nearly collapsed under it, a haggard breath leaving her. Kara was _wrong_ , Kara was angry but that anger felt so _wrong_. Something was wrong, she was wrong, _that was wrong_ —

Her breathing was coming shallow, sharp. Not enough oxygen, too much movement of the lungs, her chest felt tight and empty all at once. She could still _feel_ the red sinking into her, pouring into her through the open connection. Flecks of it circled at the edges of her vision before fading, and with each one, the pressure on her chest released just a little more.

“I need to go home,” she said, at last, keeping her voice level. She needed to go to the D.E.O., tell them something was wrong, they needed to know. They _needed to fix_ —

“I think,” Kara interrupted darkly. “You need to do the job I helped you get.”

“No, I think she needs to go home,” Cat’s voice cut in, flat. Everyone flinched, even Addy, all twisting around to look at her. Cat stood there, eyes lidded, staring at the two of them. “You have the days available, don’t you Addy?”

She forced a nod, head jerking.

“Then she can go home. It’s part of her contract. You’ll cover for her, won’t you Winfrey?”

Winn’s head snapped up, and for a moment he opened and shut his mouth like a fish, gawping. Finally, his mind put the pieces together, and he started nodding rapidly. “Yeah! Totally. I can do that. You can leave your projects safe with me.”

Kara’s hand released her shoulder and it _ached_. It was bruising, Addy realized. Kara had left a bruise on her body.

That was... bad. Bad. Kara wasn’t Kara. There had been so much red, it had been so interlaced with her mind. Psychoactive, in a way, an altered state. She was different. She was still Kara, but twisted.

Despite her empty stomach, she felt like she was going to be sick.

“Whatever,” Kara muttered darkly, turning away and marching herself back to her desk.

Cat glanced between the two of them, one carefully-sculpted eyebrow raised.

Addy ignored it all, shoving her things back into her bag.

* * *

The D.E.O. was packed by the time she arrived.

Officers of all stripes stood around, she could pick out Susan biting into what looked like a burrito with a thoughtful look on her face as she worked over something on her computer. Alex, with a platoon of fully-armoured officers, led the very same K’Hund that they had gone off to take down the night before, the alien in question bracketed on all sides by armed D.E.O. agents and with both of his wrists bound together by a bar of odd-looking metal.

Even Hank was there, leaning against the wall with eyes watching the troopers guide the K’Hund away.

“Don’t inflate your own worth, _human_ ,” the thing spat, harsh and loud. The one remaining eye he did have left was opened wide, and he stared at Alex with vehement hate.

Addy picked up her pace, ignoring the looks she was getting.

“Supergirl didn’t even _try_ to apprehend me.” He growled, sounding almost obstinate.

Hank’s face tightened. “What are you talking about?” He asked. “She said you fought and you got away.”

The K’Hund tightened his jaw. “She’s a _liar_ ,” he spat, almost gloating. “She said she didn’t want to waste her time with me.”

Alex’s expression hardened into something almost violent. “Get him out of my face,” she said, voice barely restrained, and the officers flanking the K’Hund wrenched him to the side with just a little too much force to be unintentional, guiding him towards the area where the cells were.

The K’Hund met her eyes as they passed by one another.

“Addy?” Alex asked, her voice still a bit tight. She looked concerned. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

Hank just looked between the two of them quietly.

“Kara’s...” Addy faltered, tried to push the painful red away. It wasn’t all gone, but it was fading slowly. She still wasn’t sure what it was, or how the energy had transferred into her through her psychic link, but she didn’t like it. “Something’s affecting her.”

Alex’s face fell, the anger bleeding out of it.

Hank straightened. “Agent Danvers, Addy, with me.” His tone brooked no argument, and he was walking before Addy could even think to acknowledge his request, Alex and herself trailing after him. He led them down a few hallways, further and further away from the chatter and hum of activity deeper into the base.

He came to a stop at the end of a hallway, turning on her. “Addy, can you explain?”

She swallowed, working her hand into the fabric of her pants. She smoothed her palm around on it, tried to get the sensation to ground her. It was hard, the feeling was still there, the sticky anger that didn’t leave. She didn’t _do_ anger, it wasn’t something that came so naturally to her. Irritation, yes, frustration, perhaps, but anger was... different. It was so new, so raw. She hated it, she never wanted to be around it again. She felt sick. Nauseated. Things that weren’t physical were influencing her mentality, and it was _wrong_.

She had been a static entity for so long, an existence which comprised a single mentality, unchanging, unwavering, only altered enough to suit the host species.

She _hated_ this. “Kara’s mind is wrong,” she said with too much force, her voice too hard, not the way she wanted it to come out. Something knotted built in her throat, tight and queasy. “She was being mean at work again. She used Cat’s elevator, that’s... bad. She respects Cat, respects her need for an elevator due to her fear of being infected by pathogens.”

The other two looked at her blankly. Even Alex wasn’t quite getting it.

Addy rolled her shoulders, easing the poncho-like sweater off of them. Wiggling a bit, she frowned. “Alex, can you pull this shirt over my shoulder?”

Confusion still writ on her face, Alex nevertheless did as she asked, stepping forward, reaching out, and peeling the hem of her shirt away from her throat and over her shoulder.

Almost immediately, Alex hissed. The mark on her shoulder was healing, yes, but the blotchy, painful red welts where Kara had dug her fingers in stood in stark contrast to the purple-yellow discolouration around it. “What happened?”

Addy swallowed, tried to get the thick, heavy feeling in her throat to abate. “ _Kara_ ,” she said, not liking how her voice came out choked. “I didn’t want to be around her this morning. I was afraid she’d be...” _cruel, mean, things she wasn’t_. “So I left to go to work early, and... she didn’t like that.”

“This... isn’t Kara,” Alex said, finally, glancing up at her face. Addy avoided her eyes, too raw to even _try_ to hold eye-contact at this junction. “You said something about her mind being wrong?”

“Red,” Addy said, at last, trying the word over in her mouth. “I forced a connection to Kara’s mind, and it was so _red_. She was angry. I didn’t know anger could feel like that. It felt like a—a film, something interfering with how her brain registered things.”

Alex tugged her shirt back into place, and helped Addy pull her poncho back around her shoulders.

“It... you could feel it?” Hank asked, after a moment.

Addy felt her stomach turn. “I could see it as well. Red motes at the corner of my vision, meaning it had somehow gained access to the pathways between my eyes and my brain.”

Hank’s expression was still, distant. “You’re going to have to keep what I’m about to tell you a secret,” he said, finally.

“You’re an alien,” Addy cut in, just as quick.

Alex and Hank stared at her again, looking confused.

Shrugging, she shuffled back. If Kara could get angry at her, so could _they_. “I read Alex’s mind after attempting to reinitiate the power nexus in my coreself. I got memories and feedback in the time it took for me to adjust and then lower the range. Your true form is green.”

Hank reached up to wordlessly rub his eyes. Alex just looked awkward.

“In any event,” he said, finally. “I know my way around telepathy, and... what you described isn’t a psychic effect, is it?”

No. It hadn’t felt like it, that much Addy could agree on. If it had been a psychic presence, she could’ve felt around for it and subsequently crushed it. She shook her head.

“There aren’t many things which can affect Kryptonians, Addy, for multiple reasons,” Hank explained, voice soft. He sounded reluctant, weary. “But if it can affect Kara, and if affected _you_ , we’re going to have to keep you apart.”

The tension was back. “I _can’t_ ,” she interrupted sharply. “I need to help her.” And she did, because Kara was important in any state and if she could get Kara back she could be happy and calm again and feel relaxed in her own home and enjoy things again and—and—and...

“I know it hurts,” Hank said gently. “But if it affects her like this, it will affect you significantly worse. Your body nearly shuts down in close proximity to enough concentrated Kryptonite, what exactly do you think would happen if you were exposed to that?”

Addy opened her mouth. She tried to find an answer that would be suitable, something other than “then I will simply not be affected by it”. Even though that was the truth, even though she would work around the sudden appearance of a mind-altering substance. Even if she did all of that, something told her, and Taylor’s memories echoed, that they wouldn’t care.

“If I say no?” She said evenly, trying to work through the low simmer of something in her chest again. Something raw, but distant. Fading.

“We have no good way to hold you, Addy,” Hank admittedly frankly. “Your psychic abilities don’t register on our equipment to allow us to find ways to interfere with them.”

Addy stared at him blankly. “That’s intentional. The only way one could pick up on the signal would be through another shard. It’s a method to conserve anonymity and make tracking my kind very difficult.”

Hank’s expression grew strained. “But, be it necessary, we do have sedatives. We would attempt to stop you from returning to Kara, yes, until such a time where we could figure out a method to overcome Kara’s current state. Speaking of, Agent Danvers?”

Alex jerked. “Yessir?”

“Go gather four teams, start sending them out to places Kara has been since before the K’Hund, our earliest example of this new behaviour.”

Alex didn’t even so much as acknowledge it, already rushing off and hauling her radio up to her mouth, barking orders into it.

“She cares a lot about her sister,” Hank said as they watched her go.

Addy felt something sting, something painful. “I care about Kara too,” she replied truthfully.

Hank just nodded, saying nothing else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter really, really fought me. Thus its short length and, well, everything else about it.
> 
> Today's been kind of a wreck today, unfortunately. I'm just gonna try to get some sleep. I hope you enjoyed nevertheless.


	15. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things come to fruition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is by far the most... well, violent chapter out of the bunch. This includes a short description of medical abuse/experimentation and just someone getting the absolute stuffing beaten out of them, as well as a lot of references to trauma. I can't and won't say this is totally necessary, but I feel like a forewarning is... warranted.

The internet was proving to be an inadequate source of aid for her current set of problems. Not that she had expected much else, though she had hoped that perhaps, as with most fields of study, there would be enough overlap to produce helpful information which could be slightly modified to suit her purposes. By contrast, however, using google to search such queries as “why is my friend suddenly being mean to me”, “my friend is becoming violent”, and “I fear my friend is beginning to hate me” had only returned answers that encouraged her to cut ties with said friend, and/or check if they were participating in the recreational use of psychoactive drugs.

For what should be obvious reasons - Kara being important - nothing she had read among the three pages of google results she had combed through had been worth even tangential consideration.

After revealing she was not to accompany Alex or any of the other D.E.O. teams on reconnaissance missions due to the deeply ignorant concern that she might become compromised - she would simply _not_ become compromised - she had been directed towards the canteen and told to occupy herself. That much was not abnormal, as it would happen the few other times she had been left with free time at the D.E.O. she had spent most of it in the very same room. It was insulting, yes, but not surprising or particularly unexpected.

There were a few other people present, though nobody was talking. Addy was relatively certain at least three of the seven present were there solely to watch her, or at least ensure she did not go wandering into things the government did not want her knowing. That much she could respect, a healthy dose of wariness and general paranoia did humanity wonders; they were, after all, a species which had achieved rapid population and technological growth over a very short period and had yet to entirely shed the lingering evolutionary patterns of their forebears which had been necessary to avoid being eaten by larger predators or murdered by other hominids. The fact that their luxury had somewhat dulled the edge of those natural instincts was something of a disappointment, but at the very least some still kept to stress-tested behavioural patterns.

Taylor’s memories were also proving to be an inadequate source of aiding her in any meaningful capacity. Drawing on them for relationship advice was not an option—part of her decision to connect with Taylor and her father, Daniel, had been their self-destructive behavioural habits that were accompanied by self-isolation and a refusal to accept aid. Working from Taylor’s experiences with managing and salvaging friendships would be even less effective than simply cutting ties with one of the most currently important people in her life, because at least the latter wouldn’t be stretched out over several months and include momentary spikes of suicidal ideation.

Other methods Taylor utilized to handle situations weren’t working either. To occupy herself when bored, at least before connecting with Addy, Taylor had taken it upon herself to learn memorization games. Most of them were rote and involved rhyming, but she had at one point at the beginning of her time at Winslow, prior to Emma’s opening salvo of emotional abuse but well into the period of social neglect and self-inflicted isolation, had taken it upon herself to try to recite the entirety of Pride and Prejudice word-for-word in her own head.

Seeing as she had the closest thing to perfect memory that could be afforded on the hardware her consciousness was currently inhabiting, that would neither be challenging enough to distract herself nor particularly effective at solving any of her current issues. While Pride and Prejudice itself was not an unlikeable piece of fiction, it was also not relevant to her current predicament, and following its example may actually be to her detriment.

There were no aids for her. She did not have a cellphone to attempt to contact Carol, she was actively avoiding any online activity which Winn might be able to notice, as his capacity to hide things from Kara was, as with his situational awareness, inadequate to her needs. Telling Winn about what was going on would, in all likelihood, tip off Kara about what was going on, and someone currently under the influence of a psychoactive drug which makes them hostile was unlikely to simply let them come along and help her.

So she was stuck. Unable to aid.

Again.

The quiet of the canteen felt more oppressive, put into that light. The slight clatter of cutlery against dishes, the squeak of treads against polished metal floors. This was another aspect of her biology she was becoming increasingly less impressed with: the capacity to translate emotional or mental states into physical sensation. She felt tense, she felt like people were looking at her - despite all evidence pointing to the contrary - she felt like the air was a blanket and not the nice one that Kara had given her and she needed to help or do something because Kara _was going to die if she didn’t and_ —

_BANG._

The front doors to the canteen flew open and it was not just her who flinched. Half of the canteen turned to her first, away from the sound, as though they had expected her to be the product of it, but when she just looked back at them, avoiding their eyes for patently obvious reasons, they finally turned towards the disturbance itself.

In this case, Agent Vasquez. Susan. She didn’t look any different to how she normally did, the same black-on-black-on-black and the same short-cropped hair and androgynous face pinched into an awkward expression. Beneath one arm, she had one of the D.E.O. issued boxes - a sort of black, thick plastic chest about the size of a milk crate - and, oddly, on her neck were a series of interspersed bruises; small purple-yellow blotches that grew more clustered the closer to her jaw they were.

Without missing a beat, despite her expression, Susan walked in with almost a bounce to her step. Most of the room settled back down into silence once it became clear it was just Susan and not some sort of intruder, a dull murmur of muttered conversation picking up among one particularly large group of four agents, who all spent some time shooting annoyed glances at Susan as she passed.

It wasn’t hard to discern where Susan was going by the time she had gotten halfway through the canteen.

Susan was making a straight line towards her.

She felt her hand rattle against the side of her leg for a moment, her inattentiveness letting the building-up need to move out. She tried to clamp down on it, even as the rhythmic tap of her fingers against the fabric of her chinos did more to soothe her than it didn’t, but couldn’t quite manage. She couldn’t even stop the twitching from getting more intense, growing from taps to gestures more akin to poking or jabbing, as Susan got closer.

By the time the woman in question had come to a stop on the opposite side of the table, she was trying to stop her stump from copying her other limb. She wanted to tap her heels against the ground, wanted to do a _lot_ of things but keeping them under lid was more important right now. She had to look calm, collected, so that when the D.E.O.’s plan inevitably failed - which it very well might - they would not disregard her as a possible source of help.

“Hello Susan,” Addy said, recognizing the silence was edging into that territory Taylor had called ‘the awkward minute’.

Susan’s face softened after a moment. “Hey, Addy. How are you?”

Honesty worked better with Susan, she had found. “Poorly. I still don’t know why they are preventing me from helping. I am more than adequate at avoiding contamination, it has been part of my kin’s life cycle since our inception. Cancerous malignance was a very real threat.”

Susan blinked, long and slow, looking like she was trying to process something. “You could get cancer?” She asked, sounding unsure.

Of _course_ she could. Addy tried to project her disapproval onto her face. “The only universal constant is cancer.”

“I thought it was death and taxes?”

Addy couldn’t help the squint. It felt like she was being purposefully distracted by this, but she wasn’t sure if she could resist it. “Humans have been wrong about many things, and will continue to be wrong well into the future.”

“Ouch,” Susan muttered, if not low enough not to be heard. Shaking her head and reaching up with her free hand - Addy would genuinely need to look into workable prosthetics, her lack of a data packet from the tinker hub was really becoming a detriment - to scrape her nails through her hair, smoothing it back. “Anyway, uh, I’ve kinda been told to come and collect you for testing.”

She did not trust that last word. The last time she had been ‘tested’ in any meaningful capacity she had been received by a doctor without the adequate skills to insert a sharp object into her in the correct place. “Needles?”

“What?” Susan sounded confused, which pointed towards it _not_ being needles again. Good. “No, oh, not a doctor or anything, Addy. Just, uh, we want to run some mental testing and stuff. I brought the bodysuit you like!”

For emphasis, Susan jostled the box she was clutching under one arm.

Addy stared at it.

She wasn’t really feeling the iridescent, multi-coloured quality of the bodysuit today, but then, glancing briefly at her own clothes, she wasn’t really feeling _them_ anymore, either. She was feeling very _green_ now, somewhere between that and yellow, though a darkish yellow. Bruised. Like the mark fading on her shoulder.

That Kara had left.

Addy blinked, mentally nudged her own brain. It had jumped to that on its own, which was worrying. She had full control over her own thoughts, they were hers, but the neurons in her brain had at some point come to associate her current predicament with the painful grip Kara had pressed into her shoulder. She was going to have to look into that too, and google better not tell her that, like drinking - after filtering out all of the hotlines for alcoholism, anyway, why on earth people imbibed _addictive poison_ was completely beyond her - it was something she was just ‘going to have to deal with’.

“Er, Addy?” Susan asked, after another moment. “Went quiet for like, two minutes there. Everything still working in that brain of yours?”

“To the best of its ability,” Addy agreed, prying her tappy fingers from her leg and using her hand to close her laptop, pulling the bag to it out from under and sliding it in shortly thereafter. Weighing the qualities of her outfit to the bodysuit in the box, it wasn’t really hard to come to a decision on what she was going to wear. For all that the bodysuit wasn’t perfect today, especially not today, with Kara as she was and people refusing to let her _fix things_ , which she could, it was slightly better than the outfit she was wearing currently.

Slipping her bag over one shoulder, Addy rose to her feet while carefully lifting the chair to avoid having it make that dull screechy noise it did when it dragged across metal. She had only done that once, and it had been more than enough to fully experience and enjoy the sensation of those sound waves invading her inner ear.

“I will wear the suit.”

* * *

The space they were testing her in wasn’t familiar, but the objects they were doing it with was. A series of hanging, particulate-filled bags - colloquially known as ‘sandbags’, though the name was somewhat irrelevant as not a single one of them likely _had_ sand in it - connected to chains, maybe eight all told. Some bags were made out of fabric, others looked to be leather, and one at the very, very end appeared to be made out of layers of extremely fine woven metal.

Off to one side, Susan was fiddling with a small terminal, muttering to herself, while a few unnamed people in white lab coats holding clipboards watched from a small series of benches at the far other end of the room to her. Which was, as it would happen, a relatively sizable distance, considering the entire length of the room comfortably dwarfed most school gymnasiums by two or three times.

“Got it!” Susan yelled, glancing back at the onlookers, one of whom gave her a thumbs-up that Susan had to squint to see. Swiping something off of the top of the terminal, Susan turned and started to jog back towards her, quickly closing the distance, slowing to a walk only when they were within talking distance.

“You’ve done tests on these before, right?” Susan asked belatedly, the small object she’d taken from the terminal still firmly ensconced inside of her fist.

Addy glanced towards the bags. “I have.” They had made her do a similar line-up shortly after confirming Kara was taking her home, just to get a very rough estimate on her capacity for strength. It was where they had found out her strength, unlike Kara’s, had a degree of diminishing returns. She could hit hard, harder, she expected, than any of the unaltered Brute shards would’ve been able to give out, but unlike Kara, something about how she was still partially human made the sheer extremes she could reach untenable for her.

“Great, so uh, you’ll need this.” Susan held out her palm, in which was a pretty conventional ear-piece. “You uh, you’re fine with things in your ear, right?”

She wasn’t actually sure. Taking it from Susan, Addy gave it a once-over. It had one of those over-the-ear hooks, with its main speaker resembling a ball bearing. Out from the speaker was a small plastic arm, at the end of which was a similar round protrusion, albeit this one made clearly out of the material they stuck at the end of mics. Bringing it up to her ear, she hooked it around, grimaced a bit at the sensation of something forcing her ear open, but gave it a few seconds to get worse.

It did not.

“I can cope,” she confirmed.

Susan let out a breath of relief. “Right, I’m going to go head over to sit with the eggheads. Precautions, and all that. You’ll be fed requests through that and likely be asked to reply verbally to some things, just to be prepared. Alright?”

Addy tried not to think about Kara, what she was doing, how she was being handled. If she was being handled. How she wasn’t doing anything. “Alright,” she replied, not able to put much into her voice, the words coming out monotone.

Susan’s face eased off a bit. “Hey, Addy?” She said, voice low. “Things’ll work out. They always do.”

They didn’t, but Addy wasn’t about to tell her that.

“This is unprofessional as _fuck_ , but can I give you a hug? I feel like you might need it.”

Addy stared at her again. Susan was one of the other taller agents, not quite her height, but close. She was stockier than most, even Alex, with androgynous planes to her body and precisely zero attempt to look feminine. She owned who she was.

She was the polar opposite of Kara. But she still wanted it.

“Okay,” Addy mumbled.

Arms closed around her for a brief second, a tight squeeze that she could only tangentially feel. The numbing effect on her senses wasn’t as severe as Kara’s - apparently harkening back to her human DNA, apparently - but it was still there. The depth of sensation had become shorter—the difference between being poked with a sharp needle and an unsharpened pencil nearly identical. It felt nice, it was warm, it wasn’t like Kara’s hugs, Kara hugged harder, sharper, enough that Addy could feel the press of force, but she was also bonier, with harder edges. Susan felt hard too, but broader, less sharp angles, more cords of metal than anything else.

Then they were gone, and Susan was jogging back towards the seating area.

Addy reached down, plucked at the skin-tight fabric around her legs if only to have something to do with her hand.

“Okay, Administrator,” an unfamiliar voice spoke up, transmitted straight to the earpiece. His voice was gravelly, low, but also somehow smooth. She could hear the stubble of his beard brushing against his mic for a moment. “Please approach the first sandbag.”

Approaching it, she gave it a once over. It was an identical, uniform black to all of the other bags, nothing about it gave away its contents, but she wasn’t about to dwell on it.

“Please hit the bag with as much force as you can that will not damage things nearby,” the voice continued, sounding as though it was reading from a list.

Sliding her front foot forward, drawing her arm back, making sure her thumb was on the outside of her fist, she did as asked. Her fist met the material, and for a moment it managed to resist the force. She was almost surprised—

Then it very much didn’t. The back of the sandbag exploded at the same moment her fist sunk through the material with a loud tear, a wave of black sand bursting from it, most of it carrying itself to the wall and embedding itself inside, leaving gouges on the ground as it went.

Tugging her arm a few times, Addy retrieved her limb without much trouble. The bag, however, tore almost the second after, and what little black sand was left went with it, the bottom half of the bag falling to the floor with a heavy _thump_.

“No loss to strength,” the voice murmured on the other end of the line. There was a chorus of agreements, some sounding more relieved than others. “Could you go to the next bag?”

Addy did, giving it a glance. Identical to the last, though unlike the first, its chain was some sort of black metal, as were all other chains but the first, now that she gave it a closer look.

“I am going to ask some questions, and then, once we’re done, we’ll have you hit the bag.” The voice said easily, not even stopping to let her ask questions. “For starters, how do you feel anger?”

“I don’t.” Or at least, she had yet to sincerely feel much of it. She wasn’t particularly eager to do so, either. She had felt frustration, irritation, annoyance, all of the things that Taylor’s own emotions had, but true anger, the type she had felt passing through Taylor’s memories—not so much.

There was some muffled muttering over the line. Addy could even make out Susan’s voice.

“Alright, in that case, how did Taylor’s anger feel?”

...That was a more pertinent question, wasn’t it. She gave it a thought, accessed her own data banks, even briefly retread over some of the few times Taylor had been truly, purely angry. The locker, Dinah, Jack. There were more even further back, but they were all tainted by the qualities that informed adolescence. None had been so bright as those.

“Her anger is intense,” Addy explained, plucking at her suit again. “Very loud, overwhelming. Predisposed towards an inability to properly moderate it from her father and from never having her anger issues addressed. But it’s gone quickly, it would flare, but it would burn itself out not too long after. It exhausted her.”

“Good—”

“There’s more,” Addy interrupted, tugging particularly hard on her suit. The line went quiet. “Sometimes, it would be the inverse. There was one man she hated, and her anger for him was... quiet. Resentment, a lot of it, that built up, didn’t burn her out, but was always on her mind. She fixated on it, and it was cold. It was the type of anger that let her plan, that didn’t make her lash out. It made her wait until she could hurt him the most, in the worst way, and do so without hesitation or recklessness.”

Despite not doing so herself, Jack’s death had been a culmination of that.

There was more murmuring on the line, before, finally, another request came for her to hit the bag.

She did, and it didn’t explode. Instead, her arm went right through it, up to her shoulder, and a spray of green metal grains came with it, spraying across the ground, glinting with sparks. It reacted with iron, then. Very risky, had her body been able to set it off she could’ve just detonated a bomb by hitting something hard enough.

“Next sandbag, please.”

* * *

Addy arrived at the control center just in time to see Maxwell Lord faceplant onto the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, due to a sharp shove by Alex. Behind her, there were several agents, two breaking off as they handled a box made out of lead the size of a computer tower off towards an archway with ‘hazardous materials’ written across an LED screen just above it.

“Kryptonite, Max?” Alex snarled, hands tightening into fists at her side.

Maxwell groaned, rolling to the side, his right nostril bleeding. “I came,” he gargled, pausing for a moment to wheeze and collect himself. “I came here _willingly_ , I have rights, Alexandr—”

Her boot caught him in the stomach, drawing a sharp gasp of pain out of the man. Hank was at Alex’s side barely seconds later, hand collecting around her bicep and pulling her away before she could line up another blow.

“Enough,” Hank rumbled, voice low. “Agent Danvers, step away from the man. Mr. Lord, get. _Up._ ”

Alex stiffened, but complied, easing away a few steps, her breath coming heavy and laboured.

Maxwell, meanwhile, worked to ease himself to his feet with his hands bound behind his back, blood leaking in steady drips down his chin, landing on the floor. “I was just trying to protect the world,” he said, finally, the words grit out. “I _have_ that right.”

“No, what you did was make something that has likely turned Supergirl into an _amoral sociopath_ with delusions of grandeur!” Alex yelled back, though Hank’s hand kept her in place, despite what was clearly an aborted attempt to ram her foot into his face.

Finally back on his feet, if teetering a bit, possibly due to a concussion, if Addy had to guess, Maxwell glared. “How should I have known kryptonite was _explosive?_ It’s alien material, our only safeguard!”

“If we can’t fix this, Mr. Lord, and what you described as the effects of your red-coloured kryptonite are accurate, you may have just made the biggest threat to our world twice over,” Hank said, his voice furious but so, so very _still_. His range was effectively monotone, but she could still feel it. “You might have just made it so that the only way to stop a Kryptonian is to have _Superman_ , who I should remind you has done nothing but good for us, kill one of his own _family_. Do you wonder what they might do to him?”

Alex made a noise, a choked-off sob.

The colour began to bleed out of Maxwell’s face as the words started to settle in.

“Addy what—”

Everyone’s head snapped around to her as she passed around the corner she had been hiding in. Susan tried to grab hold of her but she just kept moving, the other woman’s boots squeaking in protest as they caught and slipped across the floor.

Maybe he saw something in her expression. Addy wasn’t really sure what she was feeling, what she was showing, it all felt... _blank_. Kara could need to be killed in the eyes of these people, _Kara might need to be killed_ —

“I can make an antidote!” Maxwell yelled, sounding haphazard. “I can! I know where I went wrong in synthesizing it—”

“Addy?” Hank said. It didn’t sound like a question. “Don’t do anything rash.”

Addy came to a stop right next to Maxwell. He looked at her, looked up at her. He was shorter than her, smaller. Weaker. Addy breathed in, then out. Like Taylor did to calm herself.

So that was what anger felt like. She would have to inform them later. She felt... _still_. Calm. But she kept getting impulses to reach out and _squeeze_ , just to see when he’d start to scream. Paradoxical, but then that had become a trend lately.

Another breath. In, out. The feeling of pressure on her brain receded, her eyes catching on motes of something that were only visible when her eyes caught the light. Red, little red particulate, back in force. They hadn’t left, just gone dormant.

It wasn’t important.

“I can find out if he’s telling the truth,” Addy said simply.

Hank and Alex shared a look, though something about the way Alex tilted her chin up stubbornly made Addy think she was on her team, not Hank’s.

The air grew tense. Quiet. People watched, curious.

“Don’t kill him or otherwise subjugate him,” Hank said, finally. “Remember what I said, Addy.”

Maxwell’s head jerked around. “What—”

But she was already.

Reaching.

In.

* * *

_Max begged them to listen. Nobody would listen to him, the biological experiments needed to be perfect, they were too confident in their own equipment. His parents, his family—they were putting them at risk for what? Grant money? Credibility? The suits were bad. They weren’t meant for the tasks, the filtering system was going to fail he had to—_

**No. Too early.**

_The girl’s body was emaciated. Thin. Like it always was—_

**Taylor?**

_—but not unresponsive. The gene editing was doing something, if not enough. Every once and a while she would jerk, legs pinching up, and scream. A loud, guttural, instinctive sort of noise. The type that’s not intentional, the type of noise you could make without knowing it until you realized it was you screaming._

_Right now she was seizing, spasms and screams, sharp twists to her body as the therapy did its work on her body. Her arms were riddled with test wounds to see if she had gained the regeneration factor, little places where they’d inserted needles of progressively larger thicknesses._

_She was healing quicker—_

**No.**

_Lex had stopped being his friend after a certain point. Maxwell wasn’t sure when, maybe it was when he started noticing Lex’s fixation on Superman, how it had started to consume him. Maybe it was when he’d found out through a whistleblower that Lex had polluted half a mile of Kentucky wetlands with radioactive dumping from his continued attempts to resynthesize kryptonite._

_Maybe they’d never really been friends. Lex didn’t do friends, not like normal people. There was something broken in him, Maxwell had tried to stop it, they went to the same boarding school for a time, but Lilian’s claws had long since sunken into him, kept him in place as his family’s predisposition towards certain behavioural trends did the rest._

_But at the very least, he could say with confidence that he wasn’t exactly unhappy with him. The formula for kryptonite was almost priceless, anyone, any government, any organization, would want it. Even if they weren’t politically aligned against Superman, it was always good to have a trump card. Lex had just given it to him back a few months before his decision to detonate a bomb that killed over 30 people and heavily wounded Superman._

_Sighing, Maxwell took another sip of his liquor, watching the steady crystallization process. Hopefully, Supergirl hadn’t been lying about being a Kryptonian, the last thing he needed on his mind was another species of vastly powerful aliens, just this time without an Achille's heel._

_Honestly, the only thing he was worried about was the little red motes in the slowly-growing crystals. That hadn’t been mentioned in the recipe, though the recipe itself was too vague to really have exact directions. It was more of a list of chemicals, temperature ranges and... and..._

_Was it smoking?_

_What the fuck—_

* * *

Addy let Maxwell’s mind go, pulled her arm back, and—

Hank grabbed onto it, stopping her with a heavy grunt. Her breath was ragged, she didn’t like it, she didn’t like him, he did things to Taylor, he kept hurting her, she couldn’t get the image out of her head _she wanted to make him stop hurting people she liked_ —

“So he’s lying,” Alex said from somewhere to her right as she struggled against Hank, his grip holding firm. He was strong, she was too, she would—

Wait. She blinked, staggered. Hank’s grip started to soften. “He wasn’t lying,” she said, perfectly flat. He was necessary, then, important enough. She couldn’t get too absorbed, he was needed. “He knows how to make an antidote. He was just hurting Taylor.”

She would just have to wait until he had, then she could hurt him.

The silence was uneasy. She felt whatever had been building in her chest, in her head, begin to abate. Maxwell just stared at her with terrified, glassy eyes, still disoriented from the effects of her shuffling his mind around. Good.

“Agent Danvers,” Hank said, at last, finally releasing her arm but not removing himself from her side. Ready to stop her if she hurt him. “Take Administrator and go to Kara’s apartment, see if you can’t get an idea where she might’ve gone after what happened at CatCo.”

“But—” Alex started.

“ _Now,_ ” Hank barked, voice steel.

Alex opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again. Shut it.

“Fine. Administrator, with me.”

Addy spared one last look at Maxwell, reigned in the urge to do things to him, and turned to follow Alex.

* * *

Alex did not speak to her.

She did not speak to Alex.

There was a balance there.

The elevator doors pulled open, revealing the gloomy stretch of hallway leading towards the apartment. Alex glanced her way, a slight tilt of her head, before stepping out, Addy following shortly behind her.

The drive over had been quiet, but not tense. Alex hadn’t spared looks at her, hadn’t felt the need to, they were on a similar wavelength.

Prowling down the hallway, Addy kept her eyes peeled. It was gloomy, the windows letting little-to-no light in, the ceiling lights, normally on, were off. Unusual.

She caught sight of the door, cracked open. It wasn’t thrown off its hinges, but it was still open. Inviting. Waiting for them. Alex went instantly to her gun, sliding it free of the holster it was in, bringing it up as they got steadily closer to the door.

Her body was paradoxically still, at ease. She didn’t feel the need to twitch, to brush her fingers over things, to feel textures. She was tranquil, and it was almost a relief. The motes were bright whenever a glimmer of light caught her eye, a startling red, and they had yet to settle back down as they had before, but she could almost appreciate them for it. If they were the source of her unusual calm, she would consider ingesting them for later purposes, so long as she could overcome the negative side-effects.

Arriving at the door, Alex pulled one hand free from her gun, easing the door open.

In the living room, sitting on the living room coffee table, was Kara. She was wearing a different suit, like the one she had seen on Astra In-Ze’s body: full-black, with the small insignia of House El printed just above her heart.

She smiled at the two of them. It was hostile.

“Hello sister,” she said, voice thick with disdain. Alex lowered her gun down, pointing it towards the floor. Addy stepped out from behind her, crossed the threshold of the doorway. Kara’s eyes flicked to her, narrowed. “Addy.”

She was numb. She was numb. She was _numb_.

Rising from her seat, Kara spread her arms out, hands left bare, a lazy smile on her face. “Look, I picked out my own outfit without any fashion advice from either of you.” She took a single step forward, and Alex took one away, nearly bumping her shoulder into Addy’s. “All those years you pushed those dowdy sweaters and skirts on me! And Rao, Addy, you would have me look like a two-piece clown if I listened to a single word you said.”

It would look better than the black, Addy didn’t say. Because she was numb. She was tranquil. She was calm.

“Trying to cloak my beauty,” Kara cooed, taking another step forward. “So I didn’t outshine _yours_.”

“Kara,” Alex tried, voice faint, almost hesitant. “I didn’—”

Kara’s eyes lit up red, but didn’t fire.

Alex’s eyes widened, fear sliding into her. She breathed in, hands trembling, but with gun still pointed towards the ground. “This isn’t you,” she replied.

Kara _laughed_. It wasn’t one of her nice ones, the chortles and snorty giggles she was infected with whenever something amused her. It was cruel, cold, almost a cackle. “I am more me than I’ve ever been!” She shouted, arms outraised again, a wide, wide smile, all teeth, crawling across her face.

“Kara, you’ve been exposed to red kryptonite—it’s altered your _brain_!” Alex yelled back, voice frustrated, desperate. “You’re not seeing clearly!”

Kara froze, body going perfectly, perfectly still. Her head turned around, red eyes going faint, dimming until Addy could finally see the blue in them.

Alex’s posture relaxed—

Kara swung one arm out, and the sound of shattering metal and bone was eclipsed by a howl of pain as Kara backhanded her sister’s arm. Fragments of the gun hit the ground in a chorus of clatters and Alex staggered back, slamming into the wall, her lower arm bent oddly, out of place, unmovable.

“ _I see clearly!”_ Kara shouted, voice loud enough to make a vase rattle. “I see both of you _so clearly!_ Alex, you didn’t want me to be Supergirl. So _jealous_ of me, of the things I could do that you couldn’t!”

Alex let out a choked sob, fingers tightening around her ruined arm.

“I can _fly_ ,” Kara breathed. “I can catch bullets with my bare hands, I was learning the advanced sciences of this godless _backwater_ when I was in diapers, and that makes you. Feel. Worthless.”

“Kara—” Alex tried, but the word devolved into a pained noise.

Then, Kara wheeled on her. “And you, Addy Queen.” She breathed, stepping away from her sister. Addy could take this, Addy was numb, Addy was not fragile like Alex, Addy could _endure_ —

“Did you think I ever wanted you?”

She was numb. She was calm.

“Did you think I wanted some fucking _weirdo_ passed off onto me like a stray puppy?”

Calm. Tranquil. At peace. Kara was sick. Kara was sick. It was not true, she was wanted. She was not alone, she wasn’t—

“But no, they still gave you to me, and I tried. I dealt with your weirdness, I dealt with you getting attention. I _coped_ , like this fucking world has made me cope so often. I coped housing a _planet-destroying alien_ in my midst, as a person whose planet was destroyed. But then, you know what you did Addy?”

“Kara,” Alex tried again, voice a rasp. “Kara, _stop_ —”

“You ate someone’s mind,” Kara breathed, and she was so close now. Addy hadn’t noticed, they were nearly touching, she could smell Kara’s toothpaste, minty and biting. “You proved yourself to be a monster that you _are_ , that I need to collar and leash. You went against _everything_ my people stood for, every last bit of DNA in your half-breed body. You’re as worthless as a Daxamite prince, and god knows how many bed slaves he goes through.”

She was calm, she was calm, she _had to be calm to save Kara and had to remain okay she was nothing she was still she was_ —

Kara stepped away with a breath, eyes bright, mouth wide in a grin. “But you know what? They _worship_ me, National City, and I am finally free from both of you. From jealousy, from monstrous freaks, and I am going to _soar_.”

She turned. She was going to leave, she could not let that happen.

Addy reached out, grabbed Kara’s arm.

“Addy,” Kara said, voice suddenly flat. Empty of the joy she had been exuding. “Let go of me.”

“No.”

The world lurched, a sudden whirl of force. Glass broke against her skin in the few milliseconds of take-off, her body slammed into the neighbouring apartment, jarred into a wild spin. The world was a blur around her, she felt her body hit concrete next, chunks of it pulling up in waves as she cratered across it, the sound of screaming loud in her ears as, finally, her body broke free of the ground, twisting into a wild spin again, and slammed into a car.

Its alarm wailed, loud and bright and grating on her ears.

Addy let her vision refocus, saw the damage. The street had been gouged down the center by her body, and Kara’s building, her window, a portion of that wall—it was just gone. The building next to it had a chunk torn out of it where she’d slammed into it, and bystanders were whispering, pointing to her, to Supergirl, who now floated towards her.

Lurching forward, the metal encasing her finally gave way, the car rocking back onto four wheels when she did. She hit the ruined pavement knee-first, hand coming out to catch herself. She was dizzy, she hated dizziness, another biological failure that she would have to rectify, but she was not damaged. Not enough, anyway. Winded, yes, damaged, no. Sore, at most.

She climbed to her feet just in time for Kara to land on the ground in front of her. Flicking her eyes up to the side, she caught sight of Alex in the window, using her unbroken hand to clutch a phone.

Good. The antidote would come. All she had to do was stop Kara.

Kara breathed out, a sigh. “You know, I’m actually going to enjoy this,” she said, beginning to walk towards her, steady struts of her leg.

Addy tilted her head. “Why?”

Kara’s fist blurred and took her in the nose with enough force to smart, slamming her back into the car. The world spun again.

“Because you have a _really_ punchable personality.”

Forcing her eyes to focus on Kara, she reached out to her power. She couldn’t play with this, couldn’t do anything but her most. She didn’t even drain her body, she let her core take the load, felt the spread of awareness as it recalibrated to Kryptonian wavelengths.

Kara reached out, her fingers tangling in the fabric of her bodysuit. Touching her, pulling her free from the car with no gentleness.

A point of contact. Addy took it. Slammed her power in, forced it deep into Kara, overwhelmed the static. She bled into Kara, and red bled into her, her entire vision tinting with it, but she didn’t care. She would be enough. She twisted, drew on her capacity as a shard, and dragged to the surface the worst event of Kara’s life.

A planet exploded behind her eyes.

Kara’s face crumpled in grief, in hate. Her fingers slackened, and Addy did not hesitate. Kara was durable, and so she did not need to hold back. She drove her knee into Kara’s stomach with all the force she could leverage, sent her hurtling back some distance into the air, a dizzy tailspin that Kara was quick to correct with her flight.

The deluge of red draining into her cut out when the contact lapsed. The edges of her vision were dark crimson, flickering dully, catching on the light.

She mentally brought up her tasklist, felt herself hesitate a nanosecond. It hadn’t been used in years, which was odd. It was a function of her being, something she was capable of doing. It was the ordered list to which shards operated under, set goals, parameters, and she had ignored it.

Inefficient. Stupid.

She set the primary task to fixing Kara, secondary to conserving some energy, tertiary to limb replacement. She would endure.

“ _HOW DARE YOU?!_ ” Kara howled, anguish and hate and all the things she knew how to twist in her voice. Her eyes were red, so was her face, run through by veins of red, branching out wildly. Red kryptonite, they had called it. Fitting. “ _YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SEE OR MAKE ME EXPERIENCE THAT. I AM ABOVE YOU, I WILL END YOU!_ ”

She did not like emotions, but she knew how to process them. How to twist them. She just smiled, empty and hollow and all the things she felt like, running sub-tasks in the back of her head, seeing possible ways to approach things. Brainstorming, she called it, a riff on The Eye’s shard. It wasn’t copying the actual function, but it was delineating necessary tasks into a list and utilizing her vast processing capacity to run through possible ways to achieve them. Not precognitive, no, but good for what it was needed.

She did not care that it was power intensive. Kara was the primary task. All else was secondary.

Kara blurred forward at last, rocketing towards her. Addy let her body pull into a float and met her, twisting around as Kara’s adequate strength drove them both down. Kara hit the ground instead of her, her eyes widening, confused. Stupid. With contact re-engaged, she pushed her power in again, drew on her natural capacity, and started dragging memories to the surface. Things that would incapacitate her.

Trauma. Wounds. Things her kind was known for.

Red spilled into her, but with it came memories. Krypton’s destruction, the steady lurch of her pod, the not-sleep she experienced in the Phantom Zone, awaking for minutes at a time as the pod gathered more energy to put her back into stasis. Confusion. Dark. Claustrophobia. Astra’s death, finding out Alex killed her, Jeremiah going missing. Alura Zor-El’s face, Zor-El’s face, lost boyfriends, not fitting in—

A fist tangled in her hair, and then her head hit concrete. Then again. And again.

Again.

Again.

It hurt. It hurt, it _hurt_.

“STOP IT!” Kara screamed in her ear, loud. They were still touching. Red was still flooding into her, she did not care. She updated her tasklist, adjusted. It would be enough. Her head hit the concrete again, again, again. She felt blood begin to gather, skin splitting. Her brain lurched, focus wavered.

She considered switching back to her coreself.

Abandoned it.

Pointless.

Her head went up again, but didn’t fall. It hurt, she couldn’t see through the haze of red in her eyes, the constant flood of Kara’s worst nightmares. People abandoning her, claustrophobia, dead family members. Her fault, it was her fault. Everything. She soaked it in, revelled in it. Was the red the blood, or the red energy? Did it matter?

Kara’s fingers swiped over her face. She could see again. It had been blood.

She would note it.

Slowly, her head was angled around. It was an odd angle, one that would probably be dangerous for anyone without super durability. Kara stared down at her, face a rictus of rage, tears pooling at her eyes. Hateful. Afraid. Disgusted.

Like Taylor.

Administrator did not mind.

“I’m going to kill you,” Kara said, voice unevenly calm. Her eyes began to glow.

Something... was bothering her. There was a dull flicker in her chest, beneath the red, the constant rush of memories, of thoughts, emotions. Things she was forcing Kara to experience, things she was forcing herself to experience.

What was it?

She checked Taylor’s memories, a brief aside. They felt familiar on her skin, not piloting the body, watching Taylor exist in her world. Her universe. Homesickness, she guessed, but it was beneath her now. She was processing it.

Ah. But that didn’t make sense.

Kara’s eyes glowed, growing in intensity.

It was fear.

She was afraid.

Of death? She would not die. She would return to her coreself again. Not death, she was unable to die.

But this was death, wasn’t it?

“For every memory you made me experience, every last _horror_ ,” Kara whispered. “I am going to spend a minute carving my legacy into your body.”

She was going to be alone again.

She didn’t want to be. Couldn’t be. Would not be. She couldn’t.

She forced the memories to be louder, and for a moment Kara wavered. They experienced, simultaneously, the sight of Krypton exploding again, in perfect detail. She could feel the younger Kara’s breath, feel as it wheezed, grew tighter as Kal-El’s pod escaped further and hers lurched away. Felt the shockwaves, the horror.

The glow grew brighter. Small suns where Kara’s eyes should’ve been, bright red.

She was going to die.

She was going to be alone.

She would be empty again.

The world lurched, a green blur tackling Kara off. Hank, she could feel his psychic presence, his wavelength. The bandwidth. He reeled back with Kara’s arm in hand and _threw_ , hurling Kara directly into a building that shattered on impact, a loud crash of falling materials and errant glass.

Administrator stumbled to her feet, reached up to wipe the blood from her face.

Hank. He would be helpful. Even as Kara pried herself free of the building with a feral scream, she could feel his bandwidth. Exploit it. Resources, free for the taking, free to incapacitate.

Without his permission she reached out and watched him stumble. He glanced back at her and whatever he saw, she could feel his horror through the psychic link she was forcing onto him. “Addy—” he tried, but she simply ignored him. Tuned him out. His psychic power was vast, immense, natural. Different in quality to hers, but usable. It was very... _alive_ , a living thing, a limb moreso than a consciousness.

She speared her own into it and _twisted_. Shaped it to her will. Hank screamed.

She ignored him.

Kara landed on the ground in front of them on her knees, breathing heavily. She gathered her signal, adjusted Hank’s, made him into an amplifier. He would do good, for that, and it would be enough.

Aiming it forward, she directed her power into Hank, then out through his own psychic bandwidth. Amplified. More psychic power than she had ever actively utilized outside of her time as a piece of the greater whole.

It felt amazing.

Kara crumpled with a scream as she drowned her in it. Every bad thing, a waking nightmare, horrors-upon-horrors-upon—

“Alex!” Hank hollered.

Administrator adjusted her attention. Alex was there, staring at the three of them. An object was in her hand. The antidote, a gun.

“Now!”

A red beam fired, slammed into Kara on the ground. The red cracks receded, peeled away from her body, let off as some sort of mist. Kara looked between them, her face going from a rictus of rage to horror and hurt. Had Administrator turned on her capacity to bud, she might’ve even given her a power for it. It was an adequate emotional response—

“Get Addy too! She’s compromised!” Hank said.

Addy restricted his ability to speak. To move. Simple.

She reached out with her power as Alex turned on her. She would stop it. She would fix everything, she would—

The beam of red light hit her in the chest. Her power snapped back into herself, releasing Hank, releasing _Kara_.

Kara.

She had hurt Kara.

Addy staggered, blinked. Something like horror settled into her. She was wrong, she was wrong, her head was clearing and she didn’t want it to and—and...

She coughed, red licked her chin. Blood. Oh. Dripping, uncomfortable. The texture was bad. She coughed again, and blood made it down to her chest. She knew what it was.

It... hurt. That was what it was. Her entire body hurt. Every beat of her heart hurt. Her brain hurt. She could feel the energy moving through her body. Hurting. Interfering. Damaging.

Pain. So much pain. It hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt more than the serum. Hurt more than anything.

She didn’t want it to hurt. It was too much, she didn’t want to die. She wanted Taylor, she wanted her, her presence. She wanted Kara.

She wanted. Wanted.

...Wanted. Home. Kara. Taylor.

The world skewed, went slantwise.

Addy felt herself fall, darkness leaping up to greet her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus ends the Red K arc! This was a blast to write, really helped me regain my lost tempo from getting sick and stuff. I wrote the last 4 thousand words of this in like, an hour.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


	16. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy meets someone

_There were no clouds, no moon, no sun._

_Only the meadow, vast and unending, sprawling green waves that rose and crested without end, under an indigo sky so painfully blue it had circled back around to purple._

_Flowers surrounded her, a million different colours, each one glimmering like a gemstone._

_Warm arms encircled her, a comforting weight. They were familiar arms, she knew the digits so well—she was the one to usually use them, after all._

_She blinked. Once, twice. Looked up at the sky._

_There were no clouds, no moon, no sun._

_No winds blew, no stars shone. The sun did not rise, nor did it fall._

_“Hey,” Taylor said, voice gentle. Taylor was larger, somehow, capable of resting her chin on her head despite the fact that they should be of identical heights._

_The arms tightened, the hug growing stronger. Desperate. Like she was clinging to something that was going to leave her, something she cherished._

_Something she wasn’t._

_She craned her head back, the angle unrealistic, impossible for the contortions of any normal body._

_Not-Taylor’s head was faceless, featureless in all ways; a flat plane. Their eyes met._

_There were no clouds, no moon, no sun._

_No winds blew, no stars shone. The sun did not rise, nor did it fall._

_No Taylor._

_“You’re not real,” she said, finally. She didn’t feel curious, didn’t want to know, but had to say it._

_Not-Taylor inclined her head. “I am not.”_

_“This is just me,” she continued, the absence of texture - of touch, of where the lump in her throat should be - so grating against her senses._

_“It is,” Not-Taylor confirmed._

_There were no clouds, no moon, no sun._

_No winds blew, no stars shone. The sun did not rise, nor did it fall._

_She was alone._

_Addy reached out, cupped Not-Taylor’s face with hands made of crystal. Tried to imagine what it might feel like, had it been real._

_“I miss you.”_

* * *

Operation returned to her slowly, steadily improving. Awareness was accompanied by pain, a low simmering ache on every part of her body, strong enough to be a problem, yet weak enough to ignore. Her body felt, paradoxically, sluggish, limp, with no tension, and yet at the same time too stiff.

Yellow light pressed against her closed eyelids, the feeling of it warm, comforting, a contrast to the cool, hard surface beneath her. She didn’t want to wake, wanted to return to the meadow, to something that was already slipping, fading from thought. Another gap, widening in a large array of them in her consciousness, fragmentary memories she had to process. She wanted to sleep, wanted to rest, her body did not fire neural signals for no reason—pain, fatigue, sluggishness. All signs that she should be sleeping, resting. Healing. She knew humans healed that way.

But she couldn’t.

Something was... important. Necessary. A task unfinished. She reached out to her coreself, the gray-matter transmitter in her body twinging in protest, chafed. Burned. Too much energy usage, what had she—why did she have the tasklist operational? It was a waste of power, she didn’t need to have it anymore. Humans could order themselves, some better than others, her brain should be capable of doing it on its own. Had she taken damage? Was it why she was disoriented, the lapses in memory? It would make sense. Maybe Kara would know.

Kara.

Why—

Addy’s eyes snapped open, yellow light breaking through, blinding her for a moment. Yellow lights, fitted into a crystalline fixture, as bright as the sun, beamed down at her. So different from the red, the red she could no longer see or feel, but knew. The memories came now, flooded in, she scrambled, arm slipping off the smooth surface, her body going with it. No solar energy, why was her body empty of solar energy, she needed to find _Kara_ —

Arms caught her before she could hit the crystal floor. Warm, broad, muscular, welcoming arms. They weren’t the ones she wanted, she didn’t want to be touched, her skin crawled, her nerves fired. She cracked her head up, around, trying to find who was holding her, to tell them to stop. She needed to find Kara, she needed to find—

Kara’s eyes, set into a man’s face, stared back at her. They were the same blue, the same shape, ever-so-slightly unique. The man himself had his hair slicked back, vaguely tousled, thick and black, so different from Kara, yet similar. She could see Kara in his nose, his cheekbones, the shape of his jaw, the way his brows were crinkling in concern.

“Hey, hey, Addy. Shh,” the man murmured, and it occurred to her that she was making noises. Pained ones, low whines, the ache in her body rising to a fever-pitch with her inopportune actions, pushing out through her mouth without her consent. The man eased her back up onto the platform, back beneath the focus of the light, and the pain faded back to a dull buzz. “It’s okay, you’re safe. You’re up a bit earlier than expected, but you’re safe, okay?”

She didn’t _care_ about that. She needed to know, needed to find out—

“Kara?” It came out as a croak, throat too dry. She wet her lips, or tried. Her body wasn’t very operational, her tongue was almost dry, the inside of her mouth felt rough, uncomfortable. It was bad, bad-bad-bad-bad. She needed to fix it. Needed it to stop.

“She’s safe too,” the man said, voice lowered into an identical pitch that Kara used on her sometimes. Soothing, calming.

Addy felt her eyelids flutter. They were heavy. She couldn’t sleep, had to keep them open. “Kara,” she said again, this time with more effect, less garbled.

“She’s a bit busy right now,” the man said, a bit chagrined. “But she’s been staying here since she brought you in.”

Her eyes peeled open, the weight overcome. Addy breathed in, then out, scuffed her palm against the crystal surface beneath her, just to feel something, to distract from the draw of unconsciousness. It was smooth, cold, but resonated beneath her palm, humming soothingly. “How long?”

The man’s face twisted a bit. “Two days, Addy. Kara contacted me, the D.E.O.’s been compromised—J’onn’s status as an alien was revealed, and he turned himself in. They wanted to find you too, but Alexandra scrubbed you from the database before they took her in for questioning.”

Addy blinked sluggishly, fought against the heavy tug of her eyelids. Alexandria, who was Alexandria, she... oh. Alex. Alex was Alexandria because Alex wanted to be called Alex. “Alex,” she garbled out, head tilting back and tapping against the crystal surface.

“She’s safe too,” the man explained. “They didn’t have anyone who knew her well enough to get a read on her, she’s not under any scrutiny.”

Addy shook her head. Or tried. The motion made something in her neck spike with pain and grow stiff. “ _Alex_ ,” she enunciated, tongue thick in her mouth.

“...She wants to be called Alex,” the man mumbled offhandedly. “Right. Sorry, Alex is okay. So is Kara. I’m really just here because Kara had to go and spring J’onn with a friend of hers from Cadmus. She’ll be back later, er.”

There was a pause, Addy’s gaze slipping from the man every few seconds, forcing her to refocus. Her eyelids felt heavier, the silence lulled her. She wanted to sleep, but couldn’t.

“I completely forgot to introduce myself,” the man muttered again, reaching up to scratch at some of his stubble. He stepped away a bit more, giving Addy line of sight to his suit. It was like Kara’s, just full-body and without any impractical skirt. The House of El crest sat in the center of his broad chest, and a red cape fluttered gently behind him, attached by clasps on his nape. “Sorry about that, uh. I’m Superman, or Clark Kent. I was named Kal-El when I was born, though I prefer Clark, if that’s okay?”

Addy blinked again. Kal-El, Superman. Kara’s cousin. Oh. “Cadmus?” She echoed, still processing.

“The reason why I don’t work with the government,” Clark said darkly. “They’re a military research lab, run and funded by xenophobic bigots. Their main contribution to society is gutting aliens and finding out how they work, how to replicate it, and how to kill them. They’re bad news, nothing that goes in there tends to come out alive.”

This was Kara’s cousin. She could see the similarities now, even beyond the superficial physical ones. They were alike, despite not growing up together. She wanted to know more, wanted to talk to him, wanted to keep awake and see what he was like, how he might differ from Kara. The words didn’t come, despite attempts to pronounce them.

Clark went silent for a few moments again, face furrowing. “Sorry,” he said at last, sounding defeated. “It’s been a... stressful couple of days, for me and Kara both. I uh, shouldn’t be telling you stuff like that, not until you’re better. You’re still recovering from the antidote. Speaking of, do you feel up to hearing about why you’re in the state that you are?”

Addy ran her dry tongue over dry lips, swallowed against the stiffness in her throat. “I am.” She had to be, she had to remain awake.

“Maxwell Lord is not as practiced at gene editing as he might like to believe,” Clark began, voice slipping into something solemn. “He did manage it, you are partially Kryptonian, but the equilibrium between the Human and Kryptonian DNA is fragile. From what Kalex has been able to explain to me, your Kryptonian DNA was doing most of the work to keep you alive—your blood, your organs, they’re all Kryptonian. What’s left of your human DNA is mangled and fragile, slowly losing pieces of itself which are then replaced by Kryptonian ones. It’s a slow process, but you’re becoming more Kryptonian over time, Kalex estimated that you’ll stop ageing in about thirty years, and you’re ageing slowly as it is.

“More dangerously, though, is your current state. Kryptonite binds itself to Kryptonian cells, interfering with the solar energy there. Red kryptonite, due to its altered composition, only _affects_ the brain, the firing of neurons—things like that, but it’s prevalent throughout your body. The antidote was used to effectively purge that influence and release it as a harmless mist out through the pores of the skin. For Kara, this is fine, because Kara is completely Kryptonian, but you?”

Clark’s face fell. He reached up, smoothing his palm over the stubble.

“You were channelling a lot of power from, er, Kara referred to it as ‘the other you’. Your body was soaked with energy, and when the antidote hit you, unlike Kara, whose body could endure the process of violently stripping the contamination away, yours... couldn’t. Not only did it purge the contamination, but it also purged all of the solar energy you had in the process, and it was just too much for your body. The process was incredibly destructive to every part of your body, there’ve been more than a few close calls, Kara was worried you wouldn’t make it.”

Her coreself sent back the ping, information roaring in her brain. 593 years burned away in an instant. Half a millennium lost. All to save Kara.

She should have felt worse about it, but she didn’t. She saved Kara with it, she _saved Kara with it._ Kara was okay, she was okay, she was fine. Even if it hurt, even if her body couldn’t move, even if she was just so, so _tired_ , she had done it. She finally saved someone important, didn’t have to watch someone else _kill her_ because she was a threat.

Kara was _okay_.

Addy felt her head loll back, eyelids buckling under the weight, shutting.

“You should get some sleep,” Clark’s voice was distant, faraway, but correct. She needed to get some sleep, it would help her heal, she was fine. Kara was fine. She could sleep, everything was safe. She could prioritize tasks later, but the stress on her chest, it was gone. Things were as fixed as they could be. The resistance was leaving her body, she couldn’t even imagine opening her eyes anymore.

“Sleep well, Addy.”

* * *

“Addy?”

She didn’t want to wake. She still felt sluggish, slow, _heavy_. But not in a bad way, it felt almost like she had her blanket back, the steady weight on her shoulders, but the feeling of crystal beneath her palm told her otherwise.

“Addy, honey.”

She let her eyes crack open, the sunlamps dimmed above her. The Fortress of Solitude came into slow focus around her, first the crystal platform, next to the walls, the little pieces of crystal sticking out from odd angles. She reached out to it, listened for the resonation, felt the heartbeat of something so much like her, so familiar. She wanted to wrap herself in it, felt her eyes begin to tug close again.

Calm. Safe. Familiar.

“Addy.”

Kara.

Eyes pulling back open, Addy rolled her head to one side, this time without the twinge. Kara stared back at her from the side of the platform, bruises beneath each eye, her hair a mess of tangles and snarls. She had her costume on, and her hands were holding on to the end of the platform hard enough to make her knuckles whiten.

She didn’t look okay. She looked upset, like something was wrong. Pinging her coreself revealed her node to be repaired, and the rapid-fire response told her nothing was terribly wrong with her _or_ her body at this point in time. So that wasn’t the problem. “S’okay?” Addy tried, jaw flexing in frustration when the words came out garbled. Proper pronunciation was important.

Kara opened her mouth, clicked it shut. “No,” Kara said. “No, I'm trying, but, well. People hate me now.”

A dull flicker of something pulled at her chest, her lips turning down into a frown. Did people dislike Kara? That was stupid, Kara was important. “I like you,” she said. Maybe that would soothe her, maybe it would help.

It didn’t.

Kara’s face fell, eyes glassy and wet. “I’m—” she sucked in a breath, wet and heavy. “I’m _so_ sorry, Addy. What I did to you—”

Was not her fault. This Kara was _her_ Kara, not the other Kara who had hurt her. They were different. This Kara was good, this Kara didn’t scare her, this Kara made her want to bury her nose in her costume and let her heartbeat soothe her. This Kara made her want to explore, made her want to enjoy things, do more than just the bare minimum.

She was important. “M’okay,” she slurred out, again. Had to work on that, had to get some moisture in her mouth to fix the texture and her tongue. Bad.

“You nearly died,” Kara choked, bowing forward, her head coming into contact with Addy’s stomach. Sluggishly, she even managed to pull her hand up and plop it onto Kara’s head, felt the strands of her blonde hair with the pads of her fingers. “We—I had to put you into a stasis machine, Addy. If Kal-El hadn’t thought to get one, your own body would’ve destroyed itself. The first day was spent selectively freezing and unfreezing you temporally to fix parts of you.”

A choked breath, then a sniffle. Addy felt the tatters of her bodysuit grow briefly wet.

“I nearly lost someone again.”

She didn’t know what to think about that, how to feel. She wanted to know more about the stasis machine, because she was fine. She was better, getting better, even if she felt like her entire body wanted to fall over still. She wasn’t dying anymore, but she also knew that Kara probably wouldn’t want her to say that. It would be impolite.

“The things I said, too,” Kara choked out, painful little gasps accompanied by wet tears, soaking into her skin. “I hurt you, Addy. I tried to kill you—I said so many mean things, things I, I can’t imagine ever saying or believing, but things I _felt_. Those were part of me, Addy! I—I broke my sister’s arm, I _broke you!_ ”

Addy tried to copy the hushing sound Annette used to make at Taylor, stroking over Kara’s head with fingers that weren’t quite being responsive to her demands. She didn’t know a lot about soothing, but Annette in Taylor’s memories had always been good at it. It probably wasn’t perfect, but she didn’t really think Kara _wanted_ perfection right now. She wanted reassurance.

“I hurt you too,” Addy managed at last, the words coming out clearer than any of the ones before.

Kara breathed in. “You did what you had to.” She pulled away, though not so far that Addy’s hand couldn’t still tangle its way into her hair. She liked that, liked touching Kara. Safe Kara, not the unsafe one. She was soft, silky, warm and comforting. “I—I understand if you don’t want to live with me anymore. Even though we don’t have the D.E.O. as a contact, I got into contact with Eliza, my foster mom. She’s willing to house you, so’s Winn, but Alex can’t, because she’s still working for the D.E.O., keeping an eye on things.”

“Why would I do that?” It was a valid question. Did Kara not want her to stay? She could understand that, but Kara wasn’t scaring her. Kara was safe again, and if she became unsafe, then she might feel threatened, but until now, Kara was... Kara. Kara who smiles brightly and gives hugs and helps her figure out what to eat and compliments her clothing even though she knows it’s weird.

It hurt for Kara to say those things before. It hurt to be hurt by Kara. But Kara wasn’t that anymore, she couldn’t blame her for those actions.

Kara looked at her for a moment, one of those long, long looks she remembered from Taylor’s memories. Looks that looked into you, made her feel somewhat vulnerable beneath it. “Addy,” Kara said at last, voice regaining its smooth, gentle quality. “You don’t _have_ to stay with me, you are your own person—”

She _knew that!_ She could be more, she could do anything she wanted. She bent to Kara’s rules because she liked _Kara_. She wanted to hug Kara, she wanted to be around Kara, she liked her taste in music, her clothes, the movies she watched. “You’re important,” Addy tried to put stress on ‘important’, tried to get across the gravity of it. She had to understand. “I want to remain with you.”

Kara’s face, somehow, managed to both grow lighter and seem more tired. She was always expressive, but Addy wasn’t sure if she really liked this one. “Okay,” Kara breathed, shallow and low. “Okay, okay. You—don’t blame me? For what I said, what I did?”

She kept talking in circles. “Do you blame me?”

Kara blinked. “Of course not, you were—”

“Then I don’t,” Addy announced, twisting her tone into the ‘and that’s final’ tone that Taylor so liked to use on subordinate teammates.

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. For a moment, she just stared, before, with a breath, she relented. “Okay, you can keep living with me. But—but we should talk. About what happened.”

Talk? Why did they need to talk? The problem had been handled.

Kara must’ve noticed as much on her face. “Addy, we said and did some hurtful things to one another—we, we need to talk about that. Can you give me a chance? I’ve been, well, thinking about this a lot lately.”

She didn’t want to. She didn’t want Kara to find some other reason to get rid of her, she didn’t want to be alone. But. Still. Kara was important, and Kara was probably right. She had to remember communication was key to things like these, even if it negatively impacted her.

Nodding, Addy acquiesced.

“I—I grew up being told to hide myself,” Kara started, voice quiet. “My powers were a danger not just in literal terms, but to my family if I was caught. So, when I became Supergirl, it was so, so freeing. My purpose, finally, something I could do _right_. I failed with Kal-El, failed to give him the things he needed, failed to raise him to be _Kryptonian_ , but this? This I could do. I could shine a little bit of light, even if only so much, I could be a protector.”

Addy reached down, past Kara’s head, and plopped her hand onto hers. Kara paused for a moment, face curious, before smiling shakily towards her, tucking one hand over Addy’s while the other remained beneath. A hand sandwich. The feeling was enjoyable.

“So, when you came along I was... struck. Here was my second chance, you know? I projected hard, I wanted to raise you where I couldn’t Kal-El. It didn’t last very long, I’ll admit, about as far as getting you into CatCo, really. You’re self-sufficient, you’re not a child. You’re you.” Kara gave another squeeze of her hand, took in a steadying breath. “But we’re not the same. You’re... Kryptonian, yes, but only tangentially. You are different to me, have different cultural norms, understandings. I don’t agree with some, I won’t ever, but I didn’t take that into account. I only realized too late when I was dealing with bitterness that, well, I felt... cheated. Again.

“You’re so smart, Addy. You’re so _kind_ , too, you have such a bright, creative mind. Your fascination with waterfowl is a bit bewildering, and your colour choices are bold, but you’re also your own person. From your own people. You killed Indigo, you tried to enslave her for _me_ , and that... hurt. I got upset, I couldn’t handle you, what you did, I tried to process it but then that lab fire and the red kryptonite and...”

Kara faltered, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. She took a steadying breath in, then out, working her mouth open and shut in loose circles. Addy wanted to reach up, to pat her face, but her hand was occupied, and her stump was not long enough. A leg might work, but that’d be considered improper.

“It all came out. The things I was refusing to deal with, that you might have different views of morality to me,” Kara continued, breathing slow. “I got so angry at you, so angry that you weren’t Kryptonian enough. That you weren’t a good enough replacement. I fixated on how you were different, and I... hurt you. Badly. My words, my actions—only after the haze was lifted and you were _dying_ I realized I... hadn’t accepted you properly, as you.” Kara’s smile was sad, brittle. “I had taken what I found acceptable, and turned what was close enough to that as your ‘eccentricities’. Colours were important to you, _are_ , but they’re significantly more important than I know, aren’t they?”

Sparing a glance at the ruined tatters of her costume, crusted red with blood and looking like she’d fed it through a shredder. Glancing back up, she nodded slowly. Colours were important, more than Kara knew.

“I want to change my perspective, I won’t make you Kryptonian, I won’t try to teach you unless you ask for it, but uhm,” she fidgeted, fingers twitching. Pulses of activity, touches, things Addy enjoyed. She wanted to push her face into the hands, she wanted to be tactile, but she couldn’t. “I was going to ask, and you can refuse me, but uh. There’s this thing, a ceremony, for adoption into a house. I had been putting it off because I was conflicted about... you, about whether or not you were Kryptonian enough, but... well. I’ve realized, Addy, that there’s just three of us who won’t try to murder me left. You can take as long as you want to think about it, but I was hoping I could formally adopt you into the House of El. It’s silly, and just another cultural thing, and I know this is weird to tack onto a conversation about me overcoming my inability to accept—”

Addy made a hushing noise.

Kara hushed.

She let herself process the information for a moment. It was a nice idea, warm, made her fuzzy, she wanted to accept. Felt like she should, too, it was clearly important to Kara. If it was just a formality, just some sort of cultural touchstone, she wouldn’t ramble about it. Kara only rambled about things she found interesting, important, or otherwise had the last name of Grant. If this was nothing, it wouldn’t’ve been brought up.

“Do you want to?” Addy asked, simply.

Kara bowed her head in a nod. “I... realized I did. Addy you were dying on the flight over, your skin turned black, the antidote had destroyed so much in you. It was awful. I realized that I’d always regret not at least doing that much with you, that I’d hate myself for not taking the leap and bringing you into the fold more officially. It’s important to me.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

Kara flushed. “You don’t _have_ to—”

“I’ll do it.”

“Addy, maybe you can take some time—”

“I. Will. Do. It.”

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. She breathed in, then out. “Okay,” she said, voice a little shaky, almost trembling, but not bad. Addy knew what bad trembling sounded like, and it wasn’t that. “Okay, that’s good. I promise I’ll try harder, I want to be close to you, Addy. You’ve become part of my family in a surprisingly small amount of time. Maybe it’s the genetics, maybe it’s just, _you_ , but. Thank you.”

“We may have a problem,” Addy reminded, rather simply. Kara jolted, glancing up at her with panic in her eyes. “I do not have my powers.”

Oddly, that made her relax. “Actually, you just solar flared.”

...No, she didn’t. “I am not a stellar body,” she reminded. She hoped Kara wouldn’t need regular reminders she wasn’t one, but if that’s what it took.

“It’s a phrase, Addy,” Kara chided. “It means that you used up all of your solar energy, or rather it got hauled out of you. We were worried you would die without it but uh, actually, how _do_ you feel?”

“Heavy.” Which was true. “Tired.” Also true.

“Huh, so it’s probably a little worse on you than it is on me. Anyway, your body will gradually reaccumulate sunlight and eventually kickstart a process to give you your powers back. For me, it takes a couple of days, you? Kalex estimated a week, I think?”

A week without flight. That was not great. What if she was needed again? Her capacity to engage an enemy in combat was somewhat reliant on her ability to get near them. Her powers were impressive, yes, but having a durable body had done quite a lot to ensure she could make up for the crippling-derived weaknesses she received as a result of being a noble shard.

Wait, she was getting distracted again. “Cadmus,” she said, because Clark had said Kara was going to save Hank and if Hank was in trouble she _definitely_ needed her powers again.

Kara blinked, visibly processing the tangent. “Oh! Hank’s safe, Addy. Me, Alex and Lucy sprung him.”

Yes, Lucy would be capable of doing that, wouldn’t she? Still, she was more relieved about J’onn being okay. He was her second favourite person at this point in time and if he was trapped somewhere she _would_ find him and ensure her second favourite person remained her second favourite person. It would take time and effort, but it would not be too taxing to retrieve said information from the right person, so long as she got close enough.

Finally, though, Addy let herself relax a bit more. She blinked sleepily up at the ceiling, dragged her heel side-to-side against the crystal. “Can we go home?”

Kara shuffled somewhere to her right. “I—actually, Kalex?”

There was the sound of something coming to life, the steady shudder of metal and servos churning. The low hum was soothing, somehow. “Yes, Mistress Kara Zor-El?”

Kara made an undignified noise at the state of address. “Is Addy here free to go?”

“Of course. Please be advised, keeping her off of her feet for the next two days will ensure the least chance of a violent death due to straining healing parts of her body. But otherwise, she is free to return to her home.”

“Thanks, Kalex.”

“You’re very welcome, Mistress Kara Zor-El.”

Kara grunted. “Have to change that setting,” she mumbled. “Sounds so much better in _Kryptonese_.”

After some shuffling, Kara’s head appeared back in her line of sight, glancing right down at her. She’d risen from the chair she’d been sitting on, her cloak hanging wide behind her. “So, football carry, sack carry, or princess carry?”

* * *

Bodysuit? Discarded.

Goose pyjamas? Worn.

Television? Rugrats.

Addy leaned in further against Kara, eyes lidded, as she watched the meandering of still-diapered toddlers. This movie was, apparently, one of Kara’s favourite, named rather simply “The Rugrats Movie”. She had promised scenes with a giant, Godzilla-esque monster somewhere in there, though to be truthful she wasn’t particularly sure where it was going to pop up.

They had arrived back home sometime into the late end of the afternoon with little fanfare. She’d needed some help cutting her way out of the iridescent bodysuit, largely due to it being mangled to the point of rendering the zipper inoperable, though Kara proved once again that very little could not be overcome with brute force. After that, it had been getting a drink, some food, and settling in for what Kara swore by was the best movie from the month of November, 1998.

She was still a bit drowsy, sluggish. Her body wasn’t completely responsive as it had been, but the exposure to actual sunlight had helped alleviate some of that. Apparently the sunlamps - the things she had been stuck under - were good for pumping huge quantities of solar energy into things, but there was some sort of _quality_ to naturally-created stellar radiation that just affected things differently.

How? Addy still had no idea. She’d pursued the astrophysics journals for answers, looked up what humans defined as the laws of the universe, and despite some being _slightly_ wrong, there was no real way to explain the stuff that was going on.

Against all protocol, she had decided that, at least for now, that would just have to do.

Blinking, she returned her focus to the movie, trying not to feel put off by the high concentration of diaper jokes.

Kara bowed her head back, letting off a groan. “I swear to _Rao_ if that’s for me—”

There was a knock.

Addy glanced at the door.

Kara remained still.

There was another knock. Timider.

“Maybe whoever that is will just go away?” Kara muttered.

A third knock, significantly less timid. More of a bang than anything else.

“Ugh. Fine!” Rising from the couch, Kara took great care to reposition her box of potstickers on the table and march over towards the door. Addy watched her go, glancing back and forth between Kara and the movie, though her lapsing interest in violent toddlers was proving to be a detriment to her attention.

Kara unlocked the new door - after all, the last one was a lot of splinters at this point - and pulled it open.

Winn, with a huge suitcase in one hand and the other upraised to knock, stared back. His eyes tracked from Kara - wearing sweatpants, a National City University sweatshirt, and a scowl - to Addy. Addy personally thought her outfit was better, but then Winn had been tremendously reluctant to talk about geese, so he might favour Kara more.

Then again, he already did that normally.

“Hi!” he chirped, sounding excited.

Kara slumped. “C’mon in, Winn. We’re watching Rugrats.”

Winn did as she asked, hauling the massive, reinforced suitcase up with one hand, plopping it down on the table. “I won’t be here for long, I just heard from Alex that you two got back from the arctic and decided I could show Addy her costume!”

...She had forgotten about that. Craning her head around, Addy glanced at the massive suitcase, the television, Kara, Winn. Kara won outright for her attention, but the prospect of a costume was significantly more appealing than toddlers. Pressing her good hand into the couch cushion, Addy was about half of the way up before Kara swooped over and helped her up the rest of the way.

She really did not like being this weak. How did the infirm and the elderly _function_? It was awful.

Ambling her way over to the suitcase - _on her own_ , because she had made it clear that Kara did not need to help support her everywhere, just sometimes - Addy arrived just in time for Winn to pop the latches and throw the lid open.

Inside was black fabric. Lots of it. There was a main bodysuit which included sewn-in boots and a turtleneck-like bottom face covering. Above that was a cape, also black, that went down to her hip and resembled more of a matador’s cape, meant to cover her right side. Tucked away on one side was an arm, not quite a prosthetic, she didn’t think, but it was clearly meant to be attached to the costume to give the impression that she had two arms.

Addy glanced up. Stared. Hoped she could get across the sheer loathing she felt towards the colour black. There had been too much black fabric in Taylor’s life. She was not going to make a similar mistake.

Winn, however, held up one finger, a gesture for silence. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved a phone, tapped the screen a few times, and then pointed at the suit again.

It was now bright, fluorescent _pink_.

Addy blinked.

He tapped again, and the suit and cape were now both covered in pinstripes.

“So, I uh, miiiight’ve gotten a little invested in Kalvar tech after Alex offhandedly mentioned to it? And uh, I might’ve stumbled onto the D.E.O.’s storage of information on said tech during their, y’know, recent leadership spat.” He tapped again, the suit was now covered in red and black geese. _Geese_. “Of course, since I am, you know, me, I figured it all out. Or at least enough of it to make this.”

Turning to Winn, Addy stared him dead in the eye. “You are now my third favourite person,” she declared, simply, and then turned back to the geese print.

It changed to ducks with another tap from Winn. Then to tigers. Then back to geese. She liked the geese the most.

“You, uh, want the phone? I got to go along with this? Addy?”

“Just leave her be, she’s fixated.”

“Alright. So should I just?”

“I mean, unless you want to watch The Rugrats Movie with me?”

“I, uh.”

“You can say that you don’t, Winn.”

“...Sorry, Kara. I kinda have a _thing_ about mindlessly destructive toys.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! I might've, maybe, gotten this stuck into my head and needed to write it. This is definitely a 'cool down' chapter, the literal calm after the storm. It's a lot of fluff, I hope you enjoy!


	17. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 15 - INTERLUDE 2 [LESLIE]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leslie Willis is a woman of many things: electricity, pure snark, terrible language.
> 
> She is also a 6-month detainee, which, y'know. Sucks a lot more than all that other cool shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny CW: this is from Leslie's PoV and Leslie has a mouth like a vulgar sailor. No slurs, but a lot of f-bombs.

You know, had you told her seven months ago that she’d end up in some sort of off-the-record detention facility, she _probably_ would’ve guessed it was because one of her errant comments about some fed with a creepy fascination with teenage immigrants ended up being very, very true.

The reality, as with most things, was significantly less glamorous.

Leslie stared up at the ceiling of her little octagonal cubical of unethical detention and reinforced glass and tried _really_ hard to imagine what her parents would think about this. It was, after all, not like either of them _could_ comment on it, both being very thoroughly dead unless some other bizarre distortion of reality took place over the last six months of, to be entirely honest, fucking boring semi-solitary confinement in some bunker in the middle of the desert.

Normally, when you try to violently murder your boss in a fit of pique after being, in no particular order: ousted from your day job as a shock jock after making some - in her opinion - pretty fucking _valid_ comments about Supergirl’s boy scout bit being as transparent as her skirt was short and red, forced into the role of a _traffic reporter_ , and then struck by _motherfucking_ lightning, you’re just sent to prison-prison. Shuttled in through the justice system, do the time for your crime, all that shit, and then you’re let out four-to-ten years later as your life deteriorates under the weight of a criminal record and being functionally blacklisted from the industry you are pretty fucking invested in, and you die, homeless and frozen, after trying to rebuild your life in Seattle.

Bleak, but _normal_. It happened every fucking day.

But oh no, _normal_ was not on the table, because instead of just suffering crippling nervous system injuries she got _powers_. Electricity became her, she became electricity, all fun. Very cool party tricks, and completely fucking worthless in her current environment. Point was, because she dared to, say, gain wicked fucking powers and try to use _those_ to brutalize her boss, she got dumped into California’s alien GitMo.

Do you know what it’s like living in a perfectly transparent glass cage for seven months? Surrounded by fucking culturally inept and thoroughly upsetting aliens?

It’s not fun. At all. For the couple of hours every day they took down whatever noise mufflers stopped her from communicating with her nearest neighbours, one of which _still could not speak English_ , she got to talk the piss and complain about Supergirl or _whatever_ and just, do nothing. Three meals a day, two hours of social interactivity, and precisely _sweet fuck all else to do_. She was bored, bored in the sort of criminally insane sort of way that was deeply worrying.

The worst part was that they stuck her in a row with two of the most unappealing, completely fucking annoying aliens on the planet. To the right of her glass cubicle of human rights violations was, as far as she’d been able to tell, a _thing_ by the name of Screech. That’s what the D.E.O. agents called... it? She? He? Look, the point was, it looked like a bipedal spider with like, _seven_ too many limbs and the only way it communicated was in ear-shatteringly loud screaming. All the time.

She’d still take Screech over the one on her right, all things considered. That one? Name was J’kuza, looked like a human except they had semi-translucent skin that showed off all the icky arteries, veins, and was tinted vaguely blue. J’kuza was a little shy of nine feet tall, built like a fridge, and came from a planet where, upon evolving into an industrial era alongside several other species, proceeded to _completely wipe them out_ for perceived discrepancies in their religious text. J’kuza was a Morthan, apparently, and they only had one biological sex, with the ability to both give and carry children. Unfortunately for _literally everyone else_ , they belonged to a zealous sect of cult-like religious imperialists who viewed the existence of gendered behaviour - or anything even remotely sexual, as they reproduced without any chutzpah - as antithetical to a puritanical belief system and were obligated to ‘cull the degenerate masses as one culls diseased cattle’.

J’kuza, unsurprisingly, liked to spend their two hours of conversation telling her how much they would delight in ripping the skin from her body and using it to make a rug.

Leslie was, in complete fucking honesty, genuinely surprised she was still even _remotely_ sane. J’kuza had been here before her, meaning they’d been around to remind her each and every fucking day how much they would just _delight_ in her torturous murder. Back when she’d only been around for a few months and had expected, fuck, maybe a bullet in the skull or just shipping her off to be picked apart like some prized pig at a laboratory, she’d responded to J’kuza’s goading with equal threats of physical and electrical violence.

Nowadays? She just, fuckin’ tuned him out. The wonders life could bring her, and all that. She’d had a lot of trouble really handling conflict since she was a kid. A chip on her shoulder had kept her basically in a constant cycle of fights and it was genuinely fucking shocking - _hah_ \- to just be able to ignore someone trying _really_ hard to upset her. Thicker skin came with its downsides, admittedly, she was languishing in a secret prison facility full of alien threats, but, well.

She would trade her thick skin for freedom, honestly. Seriously, fuck this place.

Honestly, the only thing that was even remotely positive about the place was the fact that the meals were _suspiciously_ good. Like, prison slop is generally some gray semi-solid which looks, smells, tastes, feels, and just. It is revolting, disgusting pig slop that the prison industrial complex gets to force on inmates because human decency was apparently a faux pas when it came to making tons of cash. Normal shit. Instead, in casa de alien hellhole, she got three _full_ meals. Not the sort of full meals where you chuck someone three packages of dried out carbs and calories, she got like, fuckin’... actual food. Cooked by someone who was _good_ at cooking, that tasted homemade.

All of it was fucking suspicious, but then again maybe it was because they weren’t completely equipped for it? Screech ate like, as far as she could tell - bastard hid the bucket each time it came over like she might be able to reach through the goddamn glass to steal it - lots of insects and something that smelled faintly of bleach. J’kuza, on the other hand, got literal cyanide. How did she know that? Prison guards. They talk a lot, and apparently it was a huge joke about the staff about how J’kuza both ate poison and was a poisonous fucking individual to be around.

She was glad for their ability to enjoy it and remain at least a solid hundred feet from J’kuza. Really. In her hearts of heart, she would not tangle her hands around their throats like she might Cat _fucking_ Grant’s long, swan-like—

No. Begone homoerotic thoughts. Seven months was nowhere _near_ enough to turn the aching antipathy she felt towards that pompous, self-entitled, rich blonde _bitch_ into something even brushing up against attraction. No, that came two years later and three fingers worth of scotch into a bottle as you realize the teacher you _really fucking hated_ in university was mostly because you couldn’t get over how attractive she was. She still had nearly a year and a half left on that calendar date, thank-you-fucking-kindly.

Anyway. Maybe it was because she was like, _probably_ the only human they had tucked away for a later date? She’d seen Maxwell Lord of all people get dragged kicking and screaming into the depths of the prison area but then that hadn’t lasted particularly long, as he’d been out basically a month later, looking significantly less composed than he had the first time. God, if anyone deserved to stick around, it was _probably_ the opaque tech baron who liked flirting _just_ too much to make it clear that he was a creep.

Bringing her head up, Leslie let it drop back down onto the concrete bench they thought was suitable enough for a bed. That was the other thing, no bedsheets, no pillows, just... a fuckin concrete bench that she had to flip up and shit into when the need arose. Complete bullshit. Even most _prisons_ gave people beds, or at least a fucking throw pillow and a shitty goddamn towel. She got none of that.

Fuck, she’d asked a guard not two days ago for _crosswords_ , for anything they could give her to just, make time go by quickly and not get stuck in her own motherfucking, shitty, _blisteringly awful fucking head!_

Leslie breathed out, tapped her head against the concrete. Again. Because this was a mental conversation she had gone over so many times before at this point it was starting to drive her mad. Six months of captivity, six months of the occasional shrink coming in to arbitrarily decide she wasn’t safe enough to remove from their custody. Six. Fucking. Months.

The only thing keeping her sane at this point was the fact that insanity was _not_ a good look on her. Hell, it wasn’t a fucking ‘good look’ on Gotham’s weird clown fetishist and he basically _defined_ that. Nobody wanted to be the Joker, nobody wanted to be even remotely close to the Joker. People who did had a terrible habit of going insane, trying something suicidal, and then getting murdered. Not by Batman, oh no, not that he’d been around for any length of time in the last several years. No sir, you got murdered by the other fuckheads in prison, stabbed or some shit. Easy-peasy, cleaning up the bat’s mess.

But she would _not_ be Joker. Because despite, y’know, probably being like, significantly better, stronger, cooler, smarter, and all the other shit she was to some fucking mid-life crisis in clown paint, she was also significantly more level-headed. Sure, she tried to kill her boss, and sure, she’d fuckin’ do it again in a heartbeat, if only because at this point the sunk cost fallacy was _really_ chafing and there had to be _some_ fucking value out of being stuck in a goddamn glass prison for six months. But she wasn’t _Joker_ insane, or whatever. She at least could fucking look back and go ‘yeah, I could see why they stuck me in here’ without a lick of irony.

Flopping over onto her side, Leslie spared her neighbour another look. J’kuza was doing his daily push-ups, weird semi-translucent body quivering in odd and fucking really unsettling ways as he worked himself up off the ground. The dude was like, the sheer opposite of her type. It sucked. Where were all of those hot blue girl aliens she was promised? Did Jake English fucking lie to her? Did _Avatar_?

...Well, the latter was obviously a yes. Who the fuck even remembers Avatar for anything but the shitty blue aliens and weird colonial guilt thing it had going on that it couldn’t _completely_ reconcile with the fact that the entire thing was basically one dude wearing a blue alien skinsuit and had no real claim to the identity of being one.

Shit. It was actually kinda getting bad if she was going off on tangents about _Avatar_ of all fucking things.

J’kuza glanced towards her, mid-pushup, face stretching itself into one of his wild, ‘I would drink you if I could’ smiles that showed off his like, she was pretty sure _three_ rows of raptor teeth. Honest to fuck, genuinely _fuck_ this guy. Creep.

She flipped him the bird.

He kept smiling, because nobody had probably told him what the gesture meant. Ignorant fucking alien.

Glancing to her other side, Screech was... being Screech. Mandibles open, volume set to max, screaming its big fuckin’ lungs out despite nobody being able to hear it, curled up in a ball near one corner, hiding all the trash it’d managed to pile together. She was pretty sure even the damn feds who kept them all here had zero fucking clue what Screech exactly _was_ , but she was also pretty sure nobody was going to try to disarm a violently poisonous humanoid arachnid for a few metal buckets.

Flopping back around to stare up at the bare ceiling - couldn’t they have given her, fuck, tiles or something? Shit would be so much easier if she could just endlessly _count_ something - Leslie forced herself to relax. Six months of this, six months of being trapped, of getting just enough electricity to keep herself alive. Her power, it was like a secondary sense, a gaping maw that was so hungry all the time and she couldn’t fucking feed it. Whatever they made the prison out of kept electrical currents from going in any direction. She couldn’t even strip the damn lights for it.

They fed her fucking _duracells_. Literal, duracell-bunny fucking batteries on a platter alongside her ham and mash or whatever the fuck was on special this week. It was humiliating, it was fucking beneath her, and there was sweet fuck all she could do about it outside of implying everyone who gave them to her was being cuckolded or whatever. Even her insults had started to fall flat, which was a pretty big blow considering her entire thing was _being_ vehemently insulting like nobody’s business.

Well, _electricity_ was also her thing nowadays, but that really fucking wasn’t the point anymore.

Leslie brought her head up, brought it back down again with a _thud_.

Honest to fucking god, was she bored.

God, she was so bored she could almost feel it. It was like a dull, noisy fucking _feeling_ in her ear. A buzz, or whatever. Like that white noise you get, except real.

It was getting louder, too. And stronger.

...Huh.

That uh, was either insanity or not her boredom, wasn’t it? What the fuck even was it? It felt like... like a _tug_ , like open electrical sources she’d felt when she’d had her brief stint of freedom with her powers. Just it was huge, overwhelming, she could _fucking_ feel it. It was itchy, it felt... really close to her own energy, honestly. Almost identical.

Seriously. What the fuck?

Pushing herself up, Leslie slipped her legs from the bench and glanced in the direction the _whatever_ was coming from. None of the feds were around to yell at her about ‘trying to do something suspicious’ - because, of course, the sound dampening was somehow only one way so they couldn’t hear her but she could—

The noise was getting worse. It... kinda hurt, now, actually. Burned, really, felt like she was being pulled towards it, and her resistance to it was pulling her apart. Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck.

She staggered, hands going to her knees. Raptor teeth looked her way, curious, and even Screech had stopped screaming and was staring at her. She glared at both of them, even when her shoulders sagged with another powerful _pull_ from that source just— _FUCK_ it hurt. What the fuck?

It was hard to breathe now. Genuinely, each breath she tried to take got all caught up in her chest and came out like a wheeze and it genuinely fucking felt like she was trying to breathe around a wad of sandpaper. It _hurt_ , hurt so much. Like a seizure, or a stroke, not that she’d had any of those before. Was she having one now? She was sweating pretty hard, and parts of her _had_ gone numb, and well, fuckin’ anybody’s guess at this point. Fuck was she really going to die here? Did she get a tumour from the fucking lightning? That would just figure.

Fuck. FUCK.

“Livewire!” A voice yelled, and she managed to glance up. The butch agent, the one with the fucking scrunched-face and hickies she wore like a weird fucking collar. Black hair, kinda tall, built like a shithouse. Tried to flirt with her once, she was pretty sure.

Other agents were spilling in now too. The camera probably tipped them off. She was feelin’ real fuckin’ awful. Hard to see, too. Black around the edges of her vision. Why.

“Stop trying to escape!” The butch lady said loudly, angrily.

What the fuck were they even—

Her arms were lightning again. Which, y’know, wasn’t possible, because they never gave her enough electricity to do partial transformations. But here they were, lightning arms. Kinda funny, if not for the fact that it probably didn’t mean anything good that the lightning was progressively climbing its way up her body. Shoulders, chest, head. Who the fuck cares, it clearly had other opinions.

The tugging grew stronger. Leslie choked on her own breath.

“If you do not desist, we will activate defence protocols!” Butch-bitch-dumb... Just. The fuckin’ lady said.

Leslie blinked sleepily at her. The defence protocols were... right, the sprinklers. Fuck, did she ever say how much she hated water now? It sucked. She hated that more than death.

The tug pulled on her stomach.

Butch-Agent brought her hand up to one ear. Probably to get them to initiate that.

Fuck it. She’d rather die.

The next tug that came, she didn’t resist it.

There was a flash of blue, sparking along the surface of her cage, then nothing.

* * *

The sky was very, very blue. Full of fluffy clouds, and a sun. And shit.

Staring at her own arm, stretched up to the sun like some sort of... cringey fuckin’ Japanese cartoon intro, Leslie watched red lightning pluck between her digits. That was certainly new, before then her lightning had been very much a wonderful colour of cyan. She hadn’t bothered to check yet, but fuck she hoped her eyes hadn’t changed to a demonic red to accommodate. That’d be fucking awful, blue was a good look on her.

The hunger was just... _gone_. The constant need for energy, completely and utterly fucking sated by, well, energy. So much of it. She’d just _rematerialized_ here. On a roof. Watched Blonde-in-blue-red-and-gold - she needed better nicknames - hauled ass with some one-armed, beat-to-shit girl who was like, turning black? Or whatever? Hadn’t even noticed her sitting there, kinda just existing, with an unfathomable amount of energy in her.

Was this what Supergirl actually felt like? Like, the amount of energy in her right now—it was uh, a _lot_. Like, godlike a lot, like, if she wanted to, she was pretty sure she could glass half of the city _a lot_. The amount of energy that had been fed into her was just like, so much that she didn’t even really feel the urge to draw from other sources anymore.

She was so full, so fucking powerful. Fuckin’ red lightning and shit.

Shouldn’t this be going to her head? Leslie wasn’t really sure. By all accounts she could just... fuck off to CatCo and nuke the place. It wasn’t outside of her abilities, but then that kinda felt... not _wrong_ , but like. You know how much better shit feels when you have to fight to get it? Kinda like that. There was no _reason_ to anymore. She was just... above Cat. In every meaningful way. She was possibly the strongest thing on the planet right now and why fucking waste the time to nuke a highrise if you’ve transcended like that?

What’s the point of hurting someone like Cat Grant if not to make her beg for forgiveness? For clemency? And then betray any thought of survival she had by electrocuting her to death? She could just... delete her now. Copy and paste that bitch into the recycling bin. There was no fun in it anymore.

Even Supergirl didn’t really... feel like a good target? Weirdly? It was like, sure, she could _probably_ fuck her up, but last she checked Supergirl was basically invulnerable in any meaningful way and unless she got access to something that made her _not_ invulnerable it’d be pointless. Very cathartic, sure, which was why she wasn’t shooting down the idea to like, empty a payload at her fading figure and try to shoot her out of the sky, but not like, really important? Or with much of a point? She’d just get back up, after all.

Fuck she was feeling a _lot_. Totally calm, weirdly enough, completely in her own head. But like, what was the point of being calm anymore? She should be doing something with the power she had. She had so much of it too, like, honest-to-fuck she... She should really do something. Fuck up Superman or something, maybe take out a chunk of Europe and claim it as her own like every half-bit moron over there did.

Leslandia sounded nice, but like, for probably different reasons than linguists would want. Probably be better to call it Sappho 2: Electric Boogaloo to be blunter about it.

Honestly, she kinda felt _stoned_. Like, really stoned, like all the secondhand accounts of being on a gram of weed brownie type of stoned. Not completely out of it, but very close, a forced neutrality to everything. Just, this time, the edibles came with godhood.

Fuckin’ neat, that. She guessed.

But no, seriously, she’d be giving blondie the boy scout a pretty big fuckin’ props if she felt like this every day. She had unimaginable power, enough that just a whim was all that was needed to do some real damage. Supergirl was probably in a similar place? Like, impossibly strong, invulnerable, capable of generating laser beams. If she wanted to, she could just... end someone’s life, destroy an entire building with little thought.

 _She_ could do that now, like it was no big deal. She made red lightning and she could just fuckin’ up and disintegrate her enemies or things which impeded her forward march of existence. If Supergirl felt even an iota of the like, fuckin’ power high she was coming down off of right now? She probably deserved like, an eight pack, or The Purge, where she could just go out and like, stretch those limbs a little. Fuckin’ kick in that one asshole’s head who called her ass fat or whatever. That or just break everything.

Fucking...

What was she even going to do with herself?

Leslie glanced down at the shingles she was currently splayed out across, still in her fuckin’ ugly D.E.O. prison sweats.

Leaving the roof would, actually, probably be a good start. Maybe.

...She’d do it in a sec. Just, when y’know, she got the motivation to do it. Speaking of, her power was... weirder now? Like, before, her power was just _her_ , right? No upper thought about it. You don’t refer to your damn arm by a name and all that shit, but it was like, more alive. It had its own existence, or whatever. It felt _content_ , which, y’know, fucking weird. Very, very content, like it had wrapped itself up in a blanket that it was refusing to share.

Somehow, it was alive. Or at least she’d gone insane enough during the euphoric feeling of taking in all that energy that she’d mentally fractured and made up a secondary personality or something. Honestly, it wouldn’t even be the most fucking bizarre thing that could happen to her, really. She’d gotten the ability to transform into electricity after being struck by lightning, very little about herself could actually really surprise her anymore.

Was this what narcotics felt like? She’d been offered speed a few times, and thank fuck she hadn’t taken it if this was even remotely what it was like to experience something like that. No wonder that shit was addictive, she was living her best life and all she had to deal with was, what, a second feeling in her head? Some sort of fuckin’... bullshit red lightning shit? Red lightning was cool as hell, fuck that. Sure, cyan was still like, obligatorily better, but like, red wasn’t half bad either. Made her look more menacing and shit.

Sucks that all that power just also simultaneously stole her fucking thunder.

...Heh. Thunder.

* * *

Stepping out from the cab, Leslie kept a hand to her hat as she took in the smell of rural, bumfuck nowhere America.

Midvale, in all of its 15-thousand people glory, stared back. Or, well, the house did, anyway.

Turns out, that whole, high-as-a-kite? Yeah, totally temporary. Thank fuck, she wouldn’t’ve ever managed to get off of that roof if not for coming down from it. Still had that red lightning though, which was... not horrible, to be honest. She’d gotten used to it, and thank fuck it hadn’t changed her eyes. They were still ass-kickin’ cyan, completely unnatural, but cool as fuck.

After getting her head back on her shoulders and all that shit, she’d decided a vacation after 6 months of forced confinement was probably warranted. With her powers combined or whatever, she’d figured out that she no longer needed like, electrical shit to reconsolidate after going fully electric. Which, you know, had made it tremendously easy to remotely turn into a ball of electricity, infect the bank’s computer network, and siphon several hundreds of thousands of dollars from the richest while systematically bricking everything to stop them from tracking her.

Couple of days later, with some noises about being too rich for this shit and pretending really hard to look like the estranged daughter of a very comatose oil baron, she’d bought herself a house in the one fucking place Supergirl could not possibly come looking for her: Midvale.

Midvale had really only been an option because it was among some of the very few places with only one sighting of so-called ‘weird shit’, and that came down to one cherished instance where Superman had been seen flying over with something like, a solid ten or more years ago. They had a plaque for it and everything. The place was basically quintessential rural-but-not-poor America.

Hell, just up the street was a pretty big place housed by some scientist woman who’d waved politely at her when she’d had her new furniture shipped in. Eliza Danvers, familiar name, but then again so was half of the town’s names. God, bet most of them were like, 90% of the way to inbred or something.

She might hate the town, but all things considered, it was like, the dead ass opposite of National City.

So she had a house, had a new cover as Roseanne Leslie Johnson, the flighty daughter of some fat balding ugly fucker who exploited off-shore oil resources like he was running out of money. She was moderately wealthy, pretended to be a web designer - not that she knew the first fucking thing about it - and was totally not a recently-escaped unhinged supervillain who tried to kill her boss.

Nope. She was just the rich daughter of an oil baron with nothing to do but sit around and... fuck, do something with her life. Maybe.

Seriously, who knew being so strong could take the fun out of being a villain? She’d considered firing off a beam just to fuck with Kitty-Cat some, but... like. No fun. If she wanted Cat Grant dead, she would be a cloud of vaporized carbon in a heartbeat, and there was just nothing fun about that. No real catharsis, just like, an orphaned 13-year-old kid and Supergirl probably trying to snap her neck.

Seriously though, why the fuck did Eliza Danvers’ name sound so fucking familiar?

Sparing another glance at the ritzy, hilariously expensive house just up the road, Leslie eased her grocery bags up with one hand, propping it against her back.

Fuck knows. Maybe Supergirl’s whole ‘be evil for a bit’ schtick was just fucking with her head or something. She’d get over it, and never have to see hide nor hair of Supergirl again.

Thank fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! This is a pretty short chapter for me, yeah. Mostly because it's mostly set-up, that and I kinda need this. If you've been watching the news and live even somewhat close to the Maritimes, you may know that Huricane Teddy is about to do to us what Dorian failed to finish. I live literally where the hurricane lands, so anytime between Mon~Tues it's very likely my power is going to go out and not come back for like, half a week or more.
> 
> So, this is mostly a precaution, and Leslie is a really fun character to write, so it helped my stress. I hope you enjoyed!


	18. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How does a shard respond to an outside context problem?
> 
> Poorly.

“Are you sure?” Kara asked for the sixth time and counting.

Had Addy not been several hundreds of feet above her, she’d be giving her one of those looks she had learned to copy from Cat Grant—what Kara called the ‘are you sure you want to say that?’ look. Unfortunately for her, despite protesting it vehemently, her spatial warping options had been restricted even before the cycle had begun and so the feat wasn’t within her afforded skill-set.

Reaching up, Addy pressed her thumb into the button on her earpiece. “I am,” she said, trying to do... _something_ with her voice, convey something other than a monotone. She was still working on that, though studies had proved fruitful in managing to sound on three separate occasions ‘exasperated’, if what Kara said was accurate.

“It has only been a week,” Kara said, voice pinched and worried in a way that was, against all reason, simultaneously very nice and also very, very unsatisfying. “You’re allowed to take some time before trying things again, you know?”

Personally, Addy wasn’t so sure about that. The last time she’d checked social media for something outside of her regular correspondence with ‘tothe_max19’, Kara had still been facing some unprecedented backlash. Even historically, after causing semi-crippling damage to the local shoreline ecosystem during what had come to be known as the ‘oil tanker incident’, she’d still had a fair contingent of supporters. By contrast, this time around, Kara seemed to face no end of barely-concealed antipathy from most, with her supporters dwindled down to the most ardently fixated few.

Mostly because everyone thought Kara had killed someone—her, in this instance. There was a, for lack of a better term, unflattering video floating around both Twitter - for short periods, largely due to the fact that it broke their terms of service, not that it had apparently stopped people before - and a website by the name of LiveLeak. It showed, in great detail and clarity, Supergirl driving her head repeatedly into the concrete while she screamed in rage.

There was a lot more blood than she remembered there being, but then apparently she had taken severe head trauma that vastly augmented solar-powered healing could only fix so far. She didn’t like it, but then that had become an unfortunately common fixture as of recently.

Nevertheless, the fact was that people couldn’t continue thinking she was dead. For multiple reasons, of course, primarily that it was deeply insulting for someone to believe she could be terminated with some casual application of blunt force trauma. Not only that, but her death was being attributed to Kara, and it was seemingly serving as a perpetual reminder, which had made her very... _clingy_. Again, the paradoxical nature of something making her feel both very good and kinda bad was something she’d probably need to look into in the future, but she had been able to operate her body for the better part of four days at this point and she was starting to get tired of Kara looking at her like she might, at any moment, randomly cease functioning.

There might be _a precedent_ for her doing that, yes, but it was still not particularly wanted.

“Alright,” Kara finally acquiesced, tone a touch defeated. Addy could hear her take in a steady, deep breath, before letting it out in a huff. “Before we engage, Add—ministrator, do you remember who we’re trying to take down?”

That was the other thing too. Just because she had some mildly worrying holes in some of the long-term memory she had developed during her operational period, Kara kept making sure she could remember functional tasks. It was, again, insulting, but sweet, but mostly insulting. Before she became who she was now, she had kept a categorized list of every species her kin had ever come into contact with. She’d used it mostly to occupy herself while her hosts weren’t doing interesting things, but nevertheless, she had impeccable memory.

Pushing down on the spike of annoyance, Addy adjusted her own gaze down, towards the courtyard-like space nestled between a few larger buildings. “We’re going after a Citadelian, Giant-Giant, an escapee from Fort Rozz.”

Citadelians were interesting. Without the D.E.O. being particularly accessible - now being run by a Jim Harper, Kara had been abundantly clear that he was part of Cadmus - Kara had run her through a list of the most common escapees from Fort Rozz, their species, and what that brought to the table in a fight. Citadelians were all clones from an original, and suffered from a degenerative genetic disorder which resulted in incredibly low intelligence among the majority of its population. However, the original had at some point grafted his mind into a computer and taken more or less full control over the species, established the Citadel - an interplanetary empire mostly made up of Citadelians - and proceeded to begin enslaving most of his nearest neighbours, apparently for sport.

Citadelians, for all that they were genetically predisposed towards mental dullness, also happened to be twelve feet tall, extremely muscular, and retained immense strength and durability. This had come together to make the majority of Citadelians very unsubtle, and as a result, the majority had been captured or killed not long after Fort Rozz had crashed in the first place.

Which meant that the only ones remaining were the ones with enough intelligence to try to blend in.

Out of the corner of her eye, Addy watched Kara begin to rise up from her impromptu hiding place behind a hedge. Addy tugged on her coreself, widened the information flow between herself and the myriad of bugs she was currently in control of. The few fruit flies she’d planted on Giant-Giant’s back were still there, and the alien himself was still on the fourth floor of the apartment building she was staring down at, doing whatever he did in his spare time.

“You’re taking the left window?” Kara asked, voice strained, but focused. Intense.

Addy bobbed her head before she remembered Kara couldn’t see her. “I am.” Largely because Kara had demanded as much, deciding that being in the flanking position was safer than the one barreling right into him. Addy still wasn’t totally sold on the idea that the Citadelian could crush her skull - Kara hadn’t been able to, despite making a concerted effort to do so, though saying as much hadn’t assuaged her concerns any - but she wasn’t about to disagree or possibly grind the operation to a halt. It had been a struggle to get Kara to let her return to work, let alone going out and helping her with her Supergirl duties.

“Okay,” Kara more breathed than said, and Addy could even see her bobbing her head in a nod, her shoulders tightening out, body bunching. “Alright.”

Addy adjusted her angle, ran the predicted path back over in her head. She’d need to adjust her angle mid-flight, but that much was elementary.

“Approaching in—”

Addy wiggled her stump, felt the false arm attached to it click against her side.

“—three—”

She reached up, smoothing the domino mask back down on her face. Her costume today was simple, as was suitable for her first outing. Her bodysuit had been configured to be primarily white, with multicoloured circuit-board-like details spreading out from where the joints were on her body, twining together to form a large ‘A’ in the center of her chest.

“—two—”

Even the half-cloak Winn had made for her was detailed, though this time around it was a flat black with multicoloured stars covering it. Most of them were constellations from past places her kin had been, the few interpretations of the random placement of stellar bodies she’d really enjoyed, but Kara had helped her find where Rao would be on a chart and she’d made extra sure to make it stick out against all others.

“— _one_ —”

But now wasn’t the time to be thinking about that. She’d had a lot of time to think about it, to consider what she wanted to look like, to configure things to her liking. She would have plenty of time later, too.

“— _engaging!_ ”

Addy shot herself forward before cutting her flight off and letting gravity take hold of her again. She dropped, wind scraping up past her face, the horizontal speed only adding to the arc’s steady arc towards vertical. Buildings passed her by with mere inches to spare, she caught sight of people looking up at her, gawking, down on the street below.

The world rushed up to meet her, concrete skipping against her toe, as she yanked herself back up, channelling all of that speed forward. She shifted her arc, barely heard the shatter of glass as Kara entered in through the main living room windows. Her point of entry rapidly approached, a tall window set into a brick facade, her own reflection glimpsed in the half-second before her body crashed right through it.

The Citadelian was as large as Kara had described him to be. Maybe twelve feet tall, and extremely muscular, with a bald head and skin dark blue. He had a forward-jutting jaw, ape-like in truth, though most of it transitioned into dense fat, preventing her from getting much of a good look at his neck.

He was mid-turn towards her, as though he’d already seen her coming. This was unfortunate for him, as in the following brief second of action, Kara slammed into him, tackling him hard enough to jostle forward, if not enough to send him down, and reached out with one arm to wrap it around about where his neck should be, forearm closing down hard against his windpipe.

Addy kept her momentum, snapping the connection from the bugs and drawing her range back in. Palm facing forward, she drove it into the thick of his belly, her wrist jarring under the force as the fat proved out to be about as pliable as a bone. Not that it mattered, with the touch she could reach out to his mind, reaching for it, feeling the way it was built.

She was, frankly, not impressed. Minds were complicated, varied dramatically between species, and the ones that weren’t the product of natural evolution tended to have some degree of elegance to them. Giant-Giant’s mind was a mess, if she could make a comparable descriptor it was that most minds were balls of yarn, and this was more of a knot. Or a hairball. Something unpleasant and made up of a lot of tangled neural webs.

Giant-Giant made a loud, bellowing noise, his entire top half writhing as he tried to free himself. Why exactly he wasn’t trying to use his legs—well, Addy could make an educated guess.

Still, working through the mind wasn’t easy. It felt like it was purpose-built to be difficult to psychically engage with, like it was built for someone else entirely. Shelving that thought for later, she reached deeper and nudged one cluster of his mind, about the area she was pretty sure controlled his memory retention.

She slipped her body back just in time to avoid a reflexive kick of his leg.

Swooping back in, she pressed her hand back to his skin and dug in _hard_. If they’d combined his muscle memory with actual memory-memory then she could just...

Giant-Giant went limp.

Do that.

Kara let out a breath of relief, letting the Citadelian drop from her grip. “God, he smelled,” she muttered, sounding none-to-pleased about it, even going so far as to tug at her cape and take a sniff, nose wrinkling. “So is he like, under your control right now?”

Addy glanced back down at the paralyzed Citadelian. “I couldn’t figure out his brain quick enough.” Which, now that she thought about it, she reached back down to re-establish skin contact. She was _going_ to figure this out, because let it be known that stupidity could not prevent the continuation of progress.

“Then what _did_ you do?” Kara asked, voice suddenly sounding very weird. Like she was both curious but also resigned? Yet also she didn’t want to know and sounded like she was going to panic. Addy was impressed, that was a _lot_ to fit into five words.

“Partitioned his brain,” she explained in lieu of the more complicated answer that she’d more or less made her _own_ knot in his brain made out of knots to cut off information flow between the two ends. “He’s currently conscious, or... No, he isn’t.” This was delightfully interesting, had she just figured out the biological process for sleep among his people at random? She poked it again—

Giant-Giant started screaming. Loudly.

—and promptly poked it a second time.

He stopped.

Kara was giving her one of those concerned looks she normally did.

Addy ignored her, sending out errant pings to see how different things lit up. It’d taken half a minute - a frankly unacceptable amount of time, but she could make exceptions for brains that had nearly been overrun by an alien degenerative disorder hellbent on braiding every neural synapse in the brain together - but she could not confidently say she understood his brain.

Urging Giant-Giant to stumble up to his feet to the best of his abilities, Addy stepped back and gave the Citadelian a once-over.

“Administrator?” Kara said, sounding even _more_ concerned somehow.

Addy glanced her way, caught sight of that wrinkle she wore between her brows when she got upset or concerned about something. “Yes, Supergirl?” She liked calling her Kara better but she would make the sacrifices needed in this line of work.

Kara’s face worked over a small number of expressions, most of which Addy didn’t have the applicable data to parse, but after a moment she shrugged. “Why did you look at him like that?” She asked, finally.

Addy glanced back at the Citadelian, urged his arms to stretch up over his head. That gesture also somehow caused a good portion of the hormone-producers in his body to generate a flood of what she was pretty sure was the chemical equivalent of ‘rage’ for his species. _Fascinating_.

Turning towards Kara, she opened her mouth to respond—

A red blur slammed into her Citadelian with enough force to drive it into the nearby wall. Then through the wall, or at least part of the way through, leaving his front half dangling out of the wall of the building while the bottom half remained.

—and shut it.

Standing right where her specimen of new data had once been was, well, a person. He was wearing a full red bodysuit that even went so far as to cover his chin and transition into a full head covering with odd, lightning-bolt shaped fixtures on each side of his head. His outfit doubled as a mask, though it only covered the area around his eyes, as hers did, and he even had an odd device clamped to his chest.

None of this was bringing up the sudden concentration of energy, represented by arcs of gold-yellow energy that seemed to primarily come from him. This, of course, wouldn’t normally be an issue, he had just run at speeds Addy could not reasonably follow with her eyes, likely up a wall if the trail of fading energy from the window she’d entered through was any indication, but rather than it being simple radiation of some kind, she could not process it.

The energy existed, but it didn’t _feel_ like energy. It felt energetic, but also not. It wasn’t quantum—was this what deja vu felt like? Kara had described it before and, well, she’d felt like this around Kryptonite before and she was getting this crawling feeling of sudden frustration and—

“Are you two—oh,” the-man-in-red faltered, glanced around. “Oh you two didn’t need help at all, did you? Shoot, did I just punch your friend through a wall ohmigod—”

“Who are you?” Kara managed to get out, her mouth a bit loose, like she’d been gawking.

The man boggled at her. “I’m the Flash. Y’know?”

Kara’s smile turned awkward. “I, uh, don’t.”

“What do you mean you _don’t_ —”

Addy tuned them out, focused back on the energy. It was fading rapidly, and not for the first time she wished she could siphon it directly. She wanted to study it more, study its composition, study everything about it. It felt closer to _dark matter_ somehow, an existing force that pushed against the universe and—

“Oh my god I’m on the wrong Earth,” Flash said, sounding almost panicked.

Addy’s head snapped around fast enough that both Kara _and_ Flash flinched.

“Dimensional travel?” She said, just for clarification, because maybe he could be an alien from a near-identical planet or—

“Afraid so,” Flash said.

That was important. She had been trying to figure out dimensional travel here for a _while_. It had been a bit of a side-project, largely because the avenues she’d normally operate under to transition between dimensional fabric hadn’t worked right. She could do most things, such as exert psychic influence by filling in other dimensions with it, _however_ it had fallen apart when she’d tried to make substantive alterations or attempt to push through. It had frustrated her.

And here was her answer.

“So, uh, what about your friend?” Flash said, awkwardly.

Addy nudged Giant-Giant’s connection to her before urging him to pull himself free.

Giant-Giant just jerked back, pulling out a large portion of the wall with him.

She should’ve been more specific in her command. She’d make note of it. “He’s fine,” she said belatedly, glancing back at Kara and Flash, who were both staring awkwardly at her. “I checked his neural pathways. You only caused minor concussive damage, he’ll recover quickly.” Or at least, if he sustained any long-term damage from the trauma, it wouldn’t be her problem by the time the symptoms started to emerge.

Quickly glancing through Giant-Giant’s eyes - and, truly, as with most things, visual information took a half-second to disentangle and process into something her own tools could parse - she noticed the vans below. The D.E.O. had arrived, and so had the cops, apparently. Scanning the crowd, she caught sight of Alex and Susan talking hushedly, but staring resolutely at the Citadelian.

“We need to talk about your dimension stuff,” Addy said, glancing back towards Flash with her own eyes.

He boggled a bit at her. “We _do_?”

Directing the Citadelian to jump through the opening and down onto the street below, Addy ignored the panicked screaming that rose out of the onlookers for the few seconds before it became clear Giant-Giant wasn’t about to do anything. She even made him raise one of his hands to wave at Alex and Susan like she normally did with her own body.

Alex tilted her head back and groaned. Susan jabbed her elbow into her side, but other than that, they were already pulling out the cuffs and making their way over to the wire fence she’d accidentally flattened beneath Giant-Giant’s girth.

“Administrator, we need to, er, get back to work,” Kara started.

Addy turned her head to stare at her. “You use work all the time to plan things,” she pointed out, justifiably so. “You even have a room for it.” One that Cat Grant clearly knew about, but she wasn’t about to bring that up. Kara was very ignorant about things like that, and she wanted to know more about how Flash crossed dimensions _before_ working on other pertinent issues, such as Kara’s continued refusal to accept flying lessons from her, and her horrible operational security.

Kara opened her mouth, visibly about to protest, before tilting her head to one side like a curious dog. A few moments passed before, finally, she shut her mouth with a click.

“Alright, that’s fair. Let's do that, then.”

* * *

Easing her folded-up costume into the confines of her backpack, Addy gave her current ensemble a look. It was normal fare for her, acid-green chinos, accompanying blue chucks, a long-sleeved shirt of an identical colour to her shoes, with the sleeves rolled up near her elbows. She looked, at least in her opinion, like she was ready to take on the world.

Sparing her reflection a look and then accompanying nod, Addy made her way towards the bathroom door.

Kara had been committed to returning to work on foot, despite two out of three of them being capable of flight and the last - Flash - being able to move very, very quickly. Supposedly, it was the better way to hide their identities, to make them blend in easier, not that Addy was in total agreement with it.

Arriving at the door, she eased the lock open, tugged on the handle, and ventured back out into a world that didn't smell like urinal cakes and sanitized excrement. Why, exactly, humans thought public restrooms needed to be as unpleasant to exist in as possible was beyond her, especially considering single-unit bathrooms such as the one she had just been in were supposed to be better kept than the crowded, communal variations you found almost everywhere else.

She spotted Kara and Flash immediately. They were both across the hallway to her, leaning up against the wall, talking in low voices. Kara was in her normal apparel, trading out the Supergirl costume for a white dress shirt tucked into a pair of black slacks, with a pair of white flats beneath those. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, a little higher than it normally was, possibly a sign of stress - Kara did tug at her hair when stressed and when she thought nobody was watching, not that it had stopped Addy from observing it - and her glasses were fitted firmly back on her face. She'd chucked her light-gray jacket over one shoulder, half-folded, and her purse hung diagonally across her body, braced against one hip.

It was, as with most things Kara wore, very her. But also very nice to look at, if a bit bland, in Addy's personal opinion. The pants were a good touch—Cat hadn't even made a rude comment about them, which was almost praise, coming from her.

Flash, meanwhile, had shed his garish - but not unpleasant - red costume for more conventional streetwear. A flannel shirt, half-tucked into oil-stained jeans, with a pair of raggedy-looking running shoes beneath those. He also had a jacket, not that he was wearing it, the faux-fur clad winter coat tucked beneath one arm.

Flash himself wasn't much to look at either, on closer inspection. Maybe Addy was just more used to interesting people - Hank, Kara, even Alex - but Flash was just... _bland_. He had short brown hair that sort of stuck up around the crown of his head, a very lightly freckled face - with most of the freckles being condensed around his cheekbones - big eyebrows, lidded eyes, a smattering of stubble and ears that just barely stuck out.

Kara glanced away from Flash, mouth stopping mid-speech, her face lighting up once she caught sight of Addy. Addy couldn't help the warm feeling in her stomach, that twisty happiness that she normally got when she thought about Taylor. Their relationship wasn't perfectly repaired, Kara had been right in that it had only been a week, and tension was still there, but the improvements had been nice. Comforting.

Addy liked being smiled at, liked this Kara even more than she did the Kara pre-red kryptonite. This Kara was trying much harder than the original, this Kara cared, but in a way that didn't feel vaguely insulting. She could be a bit clingy, but that was a small price to pay for something so comfortable.

Kara raised her arm, waving. “Addy!” She called out, before something like comprehension dawned on her face and her lips formed an aborted attempt at blurting out what Addy was pretty sure was 'shit', one hand coming to rest over her mouth.

Why, exactly—well, Addy couldn't be sure. Kara was just like that sometimes. Tugging her bag up over one shoulder and trekking forward, she snaked her hand into her pocket, and glanced Flash's way.

Flash's look was, by comparison, significantly less enthusiastic. He looked at her with something between confusion and bewilderment, eyes skipping between her stump, her clothes, and her face.

Coming to a stop a few feet in front of them, Addy opened her mouth, if only to find out what about her exactly was so amusing to look at, and—

“Gosh, I'm so sorry Addy—I already told him my identity and I just—”

Addy glanced back towards Kara, who was fretfully looking between the two of them. She blinked, tilted her head, and thought back to some of the lessons Annette had pushed on Taylor in her youth. Good manners would save the day, she always said.

Tugging her hand out, Addy extended it towards the possible answer to all of her problems. “I am Addy Queen,” she announced, cutting to the point.

Kara made a noise behind her, somewhere between relieved and wounded.

Flash glanced between her hand and her face, before finally reaching out with his free arm, taking it and giving it a shake. “I'm Barry Allen, and—uh, you have one arm.”

"I do," Addy agreed, and even went as far as to bump her stump against the side of her torso for emphasis. "You are very bland to look at."

Barry's face scrunched for a moment, looking almost wounded, before it smoothed out into something like humour. "I guess I deserved that," he admitted.

Addy really wasn't sure what he was going on about. She'd thought they had been making obvious observations of their peers.

But, still, maybe he did. Reality was like that sometimes: deeply unfair, callous, and yet deserved.

Letting go of his hand, Addy spared a glance down the length of the mostly-abandoned strip mall. Kara swore by the fact that all the cameras were out of commission due to Livewire, back before she'd disappeared, and that it was one of the very few places they could change without ducking into an abandoned building of some kind.

Personally, despite how dirty something like a decomissioned factory would be, Addy wasn't completely sure she wouldn't've preferred it to the bathroom she just used.

Neither Kara nor Barry were making any attempt to move or do anything in particular. They just kept fidgeting, standing there awkwardly, spinning their wheels.

"Can we go now?" Addy tried, instead, because while she wasn't terribly interested in getting back to work, she also liked it more than the long stretch of stained linoleum she was currently standing on.

Kara jolted. "Oh! Right, yeah. Let's get going!"

* * *

"So, you're really an alien?" Barry half-whispered, glancing towards Kara as the three of them made their way towards the ever-towering CatCo building.

Kara smiled, though it was a touch strained. "Yup." She even popped the 'p' when she said it. Addy thought it was pretty cool. "Earth's my home, though. I think that's what matters."

"Hey, no disagreement there," Barry said, hands raised up in the universal show of surrender. "I uh, took some time to check some newspapers. You're doing good work, it's really weird to not see S.T.A.R. Labs anywhere, though. All the tech news is taken up by LordTech and Luthor Corp."

Kara's face tightened at the last one, though from the way Barry kept staring on, he probably hadn't caught it.

She had, however, because she wasn't distractable despite what Kara would say, and made a mental note to go looking up Luthor-related topics. It seemed important.

"You're from another dimension, then?" Kara switched tracks and clearly didn't try to be subtle about it.

Barry, again, missed it. She was the one who was bad at social cues, the fact that he was worse was starting to become a worrying trend. "Yeah! I—uh, I'm from Earth-1."

"We're not Earth-1?" Kara said, voice somehow both teasing _and_ mildly offended.

"Nope." Barry copied Kara's impeccable 'p' popping abilities, his voice gratified. "That's us. We started this mess, we get to name it."

Kara conceded to that with a nod, the conversation dying as CatCo grew ever-larger.

"...But, seriously, _aliens?_ " Barry asked after another moment, his voice pitched low. "Like, E.T?"

Kara glanced his way again. "Does your world not have aliens?"

"Don't think so?"

"No Superman?"

"Who?"

Kara's mouth thinned into a line, visibly processing something. "Well, I hope that just means Krypton didn't explode over there," she said, voice thin.

That much, at least, Barry seemed to have noticed. Thankfully, Addy was starting to get a little worried—that perhaps even social norms were different from where he'd come from.

"Did I just step on a landmine?" He asked, almost to himself.

Kara smiled at him again, and this time it was a bit less forced. "No, sorry, it's just—the reason me and my cousin are here? It's because our planet died. We were sent away in pods—and so, I'm hoping that Superman's absence is because Krypton never died, and not because we never made it."

Addy wasn't sure what to do with this information. She wanted to step in, to say something, because she was starting to notice that there was more to it than that. Something about how Kara was handling the topic, the way she spoke about it, it sounded almost... bitter.

Blinking, Addy took a quick step forward, reached out, and gently pat Kara on the head.

Kara huffed noisily. "I'm okay, Addy," she said, and at least this time around it sounded like it too.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Barry scratch at his chin, looking both awkward and guilty.

Pulling her hand away, Addy let herself fall back the few feet of space she'd been putting between herself and the duo in front of her. Personal space was important. Perhaps not as important as colours or the textures of things, but she needed it, and Kara understood that.

"Anyone want something from Noonan's?" Kara asked, if a bit belatedly, suddenly beginning to take the stairs leading up to the front entrance of CatCo in twos.

...She was significantly less interested in that. Noonan's was nice, sure, but she didn't want anything. She wasn't hungry, wasn't even thirsty, but going by the way Kara was staring resolutely at her, she probably was about to get something regardless.

Pointedly glancing away, Addy tried to glimpse the very top of the CatCo building. She couldn't manage it, but it beat being on the end of one of Kara's staring contests.

"Noonan's?" Barry asked, ignorant to the complex politics at play.

"It's a cafe located on the bottom floor of the building we're about to go to. They have good coffee, donuts, croissants, pies, baklava, pudding, beaver tails, pretzels..." Kara went on, and on, and on. Addy was pretty sure she was just listing the menu from top to bottom, even.

Barry stared vacantly at her as they walked, distracted enough to nearly careen into someone, who then proceeded to yell a handful of profanities their way before bustling off back down the stairs behind them.

"...and cakes," Kara finished brightly, sounding excited. She had probably just worked herself up by going over them, hadn't she?

Addy tried not to worry.

"Can I just—get a coffee?"

Kara stared at him with no small amount of intensity. "Drip, pour, cold, espresso or ristretto?"

"Just... what do you normally order?" Barry tried weakly.

That was a mistake.

"An espresso," Kara said, confidently, and Addy could already hear the following sentence because she'd gone through this exact thing when she'd shown even a modicum of interest in coffee for the tenth of a second it took her to realize it tasted nothing like it smelled. "How do you want it?"

"...How can I get it?"

That was also a mistake.

Kara opened her mouth, coming to a halt just next to the front doors, and in no order Addy could identify, began to dutifully list every single solitary espresso she could reasonably obtain. Red eye, black eye, americano, long black, macchiato, cortado, breve, cappuchino, and on, and on, and on.

It was obvious - to Addy, at least - that Kara sometimes forgot not everyone was Cat Grant. She could understand the mistake, Kara devoted a particularly large portion of her life to tending for and meeting the woman's needs, but Cat Grant was not a good representation of the average American. She was, in fact, the opposite, anal-retentive on very specific things with a notoriously refined palate for very specific things.

Going by the way Barry's eyes had since started to glaze over, she was pretty sure he could not say the same.

"Look—just," Barry interrupted, struggling for a moment. "Just a coffee, please. A double-double, does your universe do that? I went to one where they didn't, but surely that's fine, right?"

Kara bobbed her head, not missing a beat. "One coffee for you, one for me, and a juice for Addy."

Addy, having not been included in the decision-making process of that complete injustice, opened her mouth to protest.

Kara had already pulled the front door open and slunk inside, leaving her in her metaphorical dust.

Addy shut her mouth with a click.

"So, um. Do we follow her in?" Barry asked after a moment, presumably to catch his bearings, because Kara could just be like that sometimes.

Addy shrugged. "We need to arrive at the elevators to head up to our workplace. If you wish to stay out here, you can, I am personally not a fan of how Noonan's smells."

"Is it bad?" Barry asked, looking a bit nervously through the glass door. Addy followed his gaze, caught sight of Kara's blonde ponytail as it bobbed and weaved between the people milling around the front counter.

Flicking her eyes back to the dimension traveller, Addy shook her head. "No, it's just very... intense. I get overwhelmed easily, it's better in the mornings, but now they're probably making a lot of pastries since they would've run out by now, and therefore it smells."

She ignored Barry's sigh of relief. As though he was, what, worried Kara would poison him? Possibly give him something he didn't like? That was a poor opinion of her.

Then again, Kara was rather pushy when she was excited, and despite everything, Addy was pretty sure she _was_ very excited about meeting a new superhero other than herself. She could forgive that much, she supposed; it wasn't like she hadn't been overwhelmed by Kara before.

"So, uh, you've got powers too?" Barry tried, after another moment of hesitation.

Addy nodded.

"What are they?"

Was he fishing for intel? Probably not. Interdimensional though he may be, it wasn't as though he was an imminant threat to her, and he already knew her civilian identity. "I have super strength, I am very durable, I can fly"—"I'm starting to sense a pattern," Barry chimed in, somewhat pointlessly—"and I am psychic."

Barry stared at her for a moment, a curious tilt to his head. "You can read minds?"

Addy nodded.

"What am I thinking?"

...Why was he—oh, he wanted her to prove her abilities. Okay, she could do that. Reaching out to her coreself, she flicked it on, switched to the 'human' template, and reached out—

—" _My god she's tall. Like, at least six foot, that's huge, wait, shit, I need to think of something nice, she's probably reading my mind right now—_ "—

—and promptly shut it off.

"I don't think I am much beyond the norm in terms of height," Addy said, feeling her brows wrinkle together in an unvoiced protest.

"The average woman is like, five-six," Barry said rather aptly. "So you are above the average, six foot is pretty tall, even for a man."

There was a pause before Barry's face scrunched into something like recognition mixed with horror. "Not that being tall is a bad thing, or makes you a man!" He rushed to clarify, almost babbling. It might've been endearing, if it wasn't pointless. "I'm sure you'll be able to find the right guy—or, uh, girl, I don't judge!—who would love you for it anyway!"

Addy more felt than made her face wrinkle up in protest. "I don't think I want anyone like that," she said, rather simply.

Barry's face crumpled. "You can't just give up because some people were mean or rude about your height, like, people are awful! I grew up bullied and stuff because of things outside of my control, but I never gave up hope that someone would like me for who I am. You shouldn't either."

What.

"I don't want one," she said, again, because she wasn't sure what _else_ to say in response to the verbal diarrhea just thrown her way.

Barry blinked back. "You... don't."

"I am asexual."

She got another blank look. "I have no idea what that is."

The front doors opened, Kara peeking her head in through. "It means she's not sexually attracted to other people," she announced, one hand clutching a tray of drinks while her other arm curled around a brown bag, no doubt stuffed with high-calorie, sugary foods that Addy wasn't very fond of. "You guys do know we have to, like, go in, right?"

Barry, apparently still processing, nodded along dumbly. "Right, yeah, I'll—look that up? Or something. I think."

"You should," Addy agreed. "You lack a lot of pertinent information, it's worrying."

Barry shot her another wounded look.

She ignored it.

* * *

“That is not how dimension travel _works!_ ” Addy yelled, her voice higher than she normally let it get.

Barry, hunched into the seat with shoulders high and arms crossed, stared back mutinously. “But it is!” He argued, loudly. Like a moron who was stupid and didn’t know what he was talking about. “That’s how it works! Do you want me to write down the math for you, because I _will_ if it will mean you’ll stop yelling at me!”

Dimension travel wasn’t fun and games, and he had arbitrarily come to the belief that apparently, if he just ran fast enough, in just the right way, he could _vibrate into another dimension_. As though separate dimensions were based on unique frequencies or something equally ridiculous. He was wrong, very wrong. Wrong in a stupid way too, not in the fun way that humans were _normally_ wrong, like when they personified random acts of chance and chemistry as gods.

“Fine!” Addy shouted, for maybe not the first time, but it felt like it. “Show me!” She motioned at the whiteboard, where he’d drawn his stupid little incorrect very dumb _very wrong_ diagram about how the multiversal mesh worked.

Barry just about leapt from his seat, snatching the whiteboard marker up with a snarl and stomping his way over to the whiteboard, using the sleeve of his dumb, ugly jacket to begin scrubbing off his equally wrong and dumb diagram.

“Are you sure you checked for, er, _y’know?_ ” Kara’s voice asked, somewhere behind her.

Someone shuffled. “I did a full-building sweep for the specific type of radiation it gives off,” Winn replied equally, sounding exasperated. “She isn’t infected.”

“But then why is she—”

Addy wheeled, feeling for the first time like she was at the end of her rope. She normally _liked_ that saying, because it was very evocative of the stomach-plummeting feeling as the last bit of patience snaps and you lose control, but then she’d only ever experienced that vicariously through Taylor until now. “I’m _acting like this_ ,” she started, trying not to yell and managing it somewhat, though Winn still shrunk back like a spooked dog, clutching his tablet to his chest. “Because dimension travel could fix so much for me. It could help provide short-term remedies for my power issue, among other things, and he’s over there telling me he _vibrates_ to pass dimensions!”

Honestly, it was like they didn’t get it! This was huge—impossibly important. If she booted up her task list and automatically inserted her priorities, this entire thing would be priority-prime, effectively _unbreakable_ because it was so necessary. Her functions had been heavily crippled due to her disconnect from the network, she could no longer utilize other tools. Her coreself was effectively isolated and trapped on a barren planet on a universe almost completely disconnected from this one and _it would no longer be if she could pass through dimensions_.

“Because I can,” Barry said, stupidly. Like a moron. Addy turned on him next, only to find him standing next to the whiteboard, marker in hand, the full breadth of his mathematical falsehood written out for her.

She ignored him, marched up to the whiteboard, and took it in. Accessing the calculative part of her coreself was instant, and she fed the information through, adjusted to some of the observed differences in this universe, applied her own understanding of multiversal theory, and—

...

She ran it again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

But, that—it—

She ran it again. And again. And ran it at twice the power for nearly three cycles. She adjusted for variables, included all the power-expensive options, even let herself get fractional strings and—and—

“Why is this right?” Addy asked, voice completely blank.

Because it was. No matter how she ran it, how she twisted it, it came out solid. No errors, no weird predictions of infinite density like the human’s piteous theory of relativity. It was rock solid, something she expected to calculate herself, with no margins for error. The entire string, the entire concept, it was all-encompassing, existing perfectly alongside her own theoretical framework. It completed it.

And it was wrong, because that was not how dimensions _worked_. It was not how multiversal travel worked, and she should know, her kin had been born on a planet which passed through a ragged crack in spacetime and occasionally shunted individuals into alternative versions of said planet. Dimensional travel was, in almost every way, a fundamental understanding for her kind, and had only been further augmented by years of subsumption.

Her understanding of dimensional travel was perfect.

It should be.

Then why wasn’t it?

“See?” Barry started, voice gloating. “I was right, now you can’t—” the rest of his words came out muffled, likely blocked by some sort of intrusion. She wasn’t listening.

“Hey, Addy,” Kara’s voice said, so soft, soothing. She was resting her hand on her shoulder, but she almost couldn’t feel it. “We already knew there’d be some differences.”

This wasn’t just a difference, though. This was a complete restructuring of her framework of the universe. This established rules, _concrete ones_. She was already readjusting to this new information and it was taking the foundation out of her baser knowledge. How much else had she gotten wrong? What else was she missing? None of this made sense, and yet as she incorporated the data, everything did.

Baseline calculations were already spitting out wildly divergent theories, such as the possibility of there being a 5th dimensional pocket of spacetime in which things could exist, that things from outer dimensions could co-exist in this one despite the closest she personally had gotten to that was the capacity to interface with extra-dimensional things because that had not been fundamentally _allowed by the universe_.

“ _What?_ ” Barry’s voice said, again, somewhere from behind her.

Winn made a noise. “ _Dude_ ,” he tried to whisper, and failed. “ _She’s clearly freaking out about this, don’t be an ass._ ”

“ _Why should it upset her? Outside of me being right_ ,” Barry tried to whisper back.

Kara said something. She was still processing.

“ _Because she comes from an alternative universe and you likely just upended the logic she works from!_ ” Winn hissed.

It even predicted weirder things, such as energy being capable of being intertwined with certain states of mind. How much had she been relying on the new logic to run telepathic attacks? A lot, apparently. She would need to adjust, the energy loss would be lower, but it was still bothering her. This upset her entire foundation of reality. She couldn’t deal with this.

Because, as predicted, it meant there was no getting back. It shouldn’t’ve hurt, she’d made her for herself a good life and she knew better than to expect people from Earth Bet to willingly welcome her back in. She was piloting the body of a person they either loved or viscerally feared. But it still would’ve been a comfort to say that she could, that she could go back.

But this made it clear she couldn’t. Ever. There was no path to reach across the dimensional mesh because _the mesh did not properly align anymore_. There had never been a way to reestablish an access point to her original multiverse, because by her own calculations wherever she had been dragged, _however she had been brought here_ , it was... separate. It worked differently, it was as though a second big bang had taken place somewhere out in the timeless, spatially impossible void that would need to exist to host it and an entirely new universe under utterly different paradigms in almost exactly the same composition took shape.

There was no real way to quantify it, no way to really put into emphasis what this meant. She had to readjust everything, even the baser laws of thermodynamics were now ever-so-slightly different. She needed time, time to... she wasn’t sure. It felt like a hole in her chest, she felt wrong, but she didn’t feel upset about not being able to reconnect to the network. Not really. She didn’t like it, but it wasn’t upset, but it still hurt. She hated it, she hated not understanding what she was feeling; she had a bad enough time figuring out other people in the first place.

Nothing made sense anymore.

“Can I go home?” She asked, still staring at the whiteboard.

There was some shuffling behind her. “Yeah,” Winn said, at last. “I’ll cover for you, alright?”

“Addy?” Kara tried, but Addy... couldn’t, right now. It was a very odd feeling.

“I thought she was a metahuman?” Barry interrupted, sounding confused.

Addy, slowly, forced her head back around. Right. That was the other aspect. His powers. She stared at him, and he stared back, though the wrinkles on his face said he didn’t much like it. She didn’t either, but then eye-contact was bad in general. “Explain your powers.”

Barry’s face scrunched more, but into a more angry way, before settling. “Well, I can go really fast.”

“Where do they come from,” Addy cut in.

“...The metagene—wait, do you guys not have metahumans?” Barry asked, glancing around. “Random and sudden occurrences of spontaneous superpowers?”

“We have Livewire,” Kara piped up. “Or, at least, we did. She kinda went missing again and nobody has seen hide nor hair of her since.”

“Well,” Barry began, voice taking on the sort of tone that meant he felt like he had to explain something very simple. “Most living things, as far as we can tell, have a metagene. It’s dormant, normally, but if you get in just the right sort of environment, it can activate. It... kinda breaks the laws of physics? A lot? It’s... it’s a _gene_ , yes, but uh, it does things weirdly.”

That... did not sound right. But, again, what did she know? Nothing, apparently. “How did you get your powers?”

That got a wince out of Barry. “Particle accelerator accident. It caused me and a bunch of others to end up with powers, something about how the dark matter interacted with the gene, which activated it. It varied wildly with each person, some got lightning powers, I got speed, for example. That sort of thing.”

“How widespread is it?” Addy continued, already processing, because she had a thought. It was very tenuous, but she was already processing, it was helping distract from the crushing reality that she had been wrong. Very, very wrong. She disliked being wrong and would take steps to ensure it never happened again.

“Er,” Barry faltered again, looking at her oddly. “We’re not entirely sure? But that’s kinda the thing—this is my own personal theory, so grain of salt, but the gene isn’t... It isn’t unique to humans, but not like, because we have dogs suddenly flying? It’s more that the gene, its existence, it’s... universal. Most people who know about it would just shrug it off as another oddity for the metagene, but like, I’m pretty sure it’s universal in the literal sense here.”

Working that into the equation wasn’t difficult. The hunch was getting stronger, she was processing faster, it wasn’t hard to put two-and-two together. Kara’s absurd abilities, drawn seemingly from an evolutionary predisposition towards sunbathing, other aliens with their own reality-defying abilities. The prevalence of telepathy, of the relative uniformity of alien shapes—species when she had been a shard had been wildly diverse in appearance, but most in this universe trended towards bipedal with two arms and one head.

Oh.

It clicked. She could focus on this, this was new and exciting, she had ideas now. That gene? Barry might be right, unfortunately. Kara’s abilities, they weren’t derived from evolutionary pressure as she expected. The gene was random, as explained, and at some point in her species' history someone must’ve activated one on Krypton. It laid dormant, the hosts unaware, because Kryptonians couldn’t siphon energy from a red sun, but it had spread, become dominant among the species.

There was something odd here. A gene shouldn’t be able to do as much, but then again she was being faced with new realities every day. She could work with this, she would need some time and some way to process things but, but—

Snapping her head around to Barry, Addy stared at him. “I need you to bleed,” she explained matter-of-factly.

Barry spluttered. “I thought you’d forgiven me!”

How was _that_ relevant? “I need it for study,” she clarified, glancing around for a sharp object and finding a pen. She reached for it, only to be stopped by Kara.

“Addy,” she said, sounding almost tired. “I can get a needle. Don’t try to stab people with pens.”

She’d keep that in mind.

“I still haven’t agreed to _any of this?_ You all know that, right?” Barry interrupted.

Kara let go of Addy’s arm. “Please?” She asked, sounding a bit awkward. “I know this is weird but, like, if it can help Addy figure something out?”

Barry stared, and stared, and stared. Finally, after a long moment, he sighed. “Fine, but only once, if you lose this blood I don’t _care_ because I am not letting you stab me with anything after that point.”

Addy still thought the pen would’ve been quicker.

* * *

“Alright, give it here,” Alex said, holding out one arm.

Addy dutifully handed the vial of blood over.

The apartment was pretty packed, despite everything else that had happened today. She didn’t really want it to be, but then today was the one day they could manage to put together to ensure everyone could get here. Supposedly, Alex’s new boss was being very unfair in scheduling.

Still, she also didn’t totally mind it. Coming down from realizing her entire world was fundamentally different to how it was before had been... difficult, yes, but not so bad that she felt like she needed to lay on her bed and try not to think for a while.

She could hear James, Winn and Lucy talking to one-another somewhere behind her, a low murmur of chatter. Kara was still absent, having gone to see Barry off, and the air smelled pungently of Kara’s more favourite foods. It wasn’t perfect, she wanted it to be less intense, it felt like everything was too loud, too much, but she had endured significantly more for less, so she could deal with this.

Alex tucked the vial away into a small metal clamshell container, clicking it shut shortly after and slipping it into her bag. “I’m not sure what I’ll get out of sequencing it, but I’ll tell you, alright?”

Addy liked this version of Alex, honestly. She knew that Alex didn’t totally see her as an equal, or at least that Alex had difficulties reconciling her outward presentation with the vast sums of knowledge she had access to. Still, like Kara, she was taking steps, and this was one of them. Alex was taciturn, but not unkind, professional and very straightforward. Honestly, Addy thought Alex and Taylor would’ve gotten along really well. “Thank you.”

Alex smiled a bit awkwardly. “It’s really not a problem, the current head of the D.E.O. has me basically on-base all the time. I’m barred from any actual operations.”

“Did you know they wanted me to come in as a military affiliate for your interrogation?” Lucy piped up, causing James, sitting next to her, to startle. He shot her a worried look, but she just rolled her eyes at him, flicking him on the nose. “I said no, obviously, but they offered. I think my dad wanted me back in, pulled some strings, otherwise the salary they were offering me would’ve had a few fewer zeroes.”

“I guess we can all be glad you didn’t, then,” Alex said with a sort of forced calm. The idea probably terrified Alex, though whether it was the idea of Lucy knowing her well enough to out her true involvement with J’onn - being an accomplice to what was technically a wildly illegal act - or simply because the idea of Lucy being in a position of unmatched authority over her was deeply unsettling, Addy couldn’t tell.

Lucy just snorted, flipping one leg over the other and wagging her foot in Alex’s general direction. “I wasn’t even tempted, I’ll admit, but it did cross my desk. You can now thank me for saving your job.”

Alex’s face scrunched, but not in that bad, bitter way. More in the playful way she’d seen her glare at Kara. “That’s an awful lot of smug, _Little_ Lane.”

Lucy’s foot waggle stopped mid-motion, her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Where’d you hear that?” She asked, voice all sweet and happy and somehow more intimidating for it.

Alex’s face broke into a broad, shit-eating smile. “I’m going to let you figure that out on your own.”

Lucy’s head snapped around to James. He brought both of his hands up in a silent surrender, shaking his head. It went to Winn, who shrunk back and shook his head like he might manage to detach it from his shoulders.

Then she turned to her.

Addy blinked. “Why would I call you that?” She asked, simply. “I have no context for what a ‘Large Lane’ might look like, why would I call you little without the proper context?” Outside of an actual lane on a paved street, in any event.

Lucy’s head snapped back around to Alex.

Alex just shrugged, grin broad.

The front door behind her opened. Addy craned her head around, catching sight of a slightly haggard-looking Kara with a few smudges of dirt on her chin. She waved.

Kara, tiredly, waved back.

“I swear to god, Alex,” Lucy said, voice thick with harmful intent. “You tell me or so help me go—”

“I sent Barry back,” Kara announced, stepping fully in through the threshold.

She could all but hear Lucy’s head snap around. “Kara did you tell your sister about what Miss Grant calls me?!”

Kara jolted, probably because she hadn’t expected being snarled at. Addy could sympathize. “What? No. Alex, what did you do?”

“ _Me_?” Alex interrupted, sounding faux-affronted. “Why, I just called her by her title.”

Kara’s face scrunched in confusion. “Lieutenant?”

Lucy made a garbled, offended noise. “Major, Kara, I’m a Major.”

Kara bumbled on past, nodding thoughtfully as she marched her way towards the fridge. “Sorry, Major.”

Addy glanced back down at the screen of her computer, still working through a few tricky problems that Winn had refused to even give her hints on. Python was turning out to be wonderfully complicated, as it would turn out.

“No, but, really. What did she call you?” Kara said from the kitchen.

There was no response.

“Guys?”

Addy glanced up just in time to see the four other occupants - excluding herself and Kara - rise in sync from their seats. Their expressions were glazed-over, empty, completely vacant, without any comprehension whatsoever. Without even a moment’s hesitation, the three began to walk, a steady stomp-stomp-stomp of synchronized footfalls.

Addy pushed her laptop to the side, easing it up onto the table next to her chair. Winn was almost at the door already, arm outstretched to try to pull it open.

Scrambling to her feet, Addy pushed aside the thoughts that maybe they just wanted to leave, that maybe someone else was giving her a cold shoulder, that they’d turn and yell and scream at her for interrupting them and tugged on her flight, jarring forward just fast enough to ease herself between Winn and the door, arms outstretched.

Winn twisted the knob, pulled, and Addy didn’t budge.

He tried again. And again. And again.

Kara scrambled out from the kitchen, her eyes wide, horrified. Addy watched something in her ease at the sight of what was going on - Winn trying repeatedly to open the door, the three other odd-acting-people waiting patiently behind him in a line - but nothing about her face was calm or collected.

“Kara?” Addy asked, feeling the bump of the door against her back.

Kara’s throat bobbed. “It’s happening outside,” she said, at last. “The streets—there are hundreds, thousands of people out there.”

Addy trained her eyes down towards Winn, the way he kept trying to open the door, the glazed look on his face. She held back on the urge to dig into his brain, to reach out to him, to activate her powers. Just in case, she had to be sure that she wouldn’t hurt any of them, that she wouldn’t be alone again.

She glanced back up.

Kara met her gaze, her face twisted. “Can you fix them?” She asked weakly.

Addy glanced back down, felt the steady thump-thump-thump of the door against her back, the sound of the knob clattering as Winn tried and tried and tried and instead of getting upset or pouting when he didn’t succeed he just, kept going. It was the opposite of Winn, of who he was, of how he acted.

Something was controlling him. She wanted to check, wanted to make sure, but again, it was a risk, wasn’t it?

A risk she didn’t want to take. But she’d have to, wouldn’t she? Because she didn’t know what was happening, why other people were like this. She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t affected, why she couldn’t feel whatever great presence had overtaken everyone else but her and Kara.

“I don’t know,” Addy said, and it was the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [wild cackling] so I'm alive. Mostly. Lost power a few times, but Teddy kinda just skimmed past my region. Best friend lost a chunk of her backyard to flooding though, which sucks.
> 
> Anyway, this chapter is moving back into Supergirl plot stuff! But it's also in this weird position where it's like, in the middle between 3 arcs and so if it's kinda jarring I apologize.


	19. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Gang Gets Mind Controlled

Addy watched Kara pace back and forth, the rhythmic sound of her footfalls not even remotely soothing despite having been a source of calm not too long ago. She was muttering under her breath rapidly, in a language Addy couldn’t speak, and every once and a while her head would snap up, eyes staring off towards something Addy couldn’t see, before yanking itself back down.

Behind her, attached to various pieces of furniture, were the four others she’d started the night off with. Lucy had been attached to a kitchen chair with duct tape, wrapped at least four or five times around, not that it had stopped her from attempting to slowly inch her way towards the door. James had gotten much of the same treatment, though his surprising strength had necessitated he be taped to the recliner, and with more than a few additional layers of duct tape.

Alex and Winn had been a struggle in a different way. Alex was, unsurprisingly, significantly more strong than anyone in the room bar herself or Kara, including James, and as a result, had been the only person Kara had tied up with rope. Both legs had been tied, and then her arms had been tied down to her torso. Where, exactly, Kara had procured the rope from—well, that was a question for later, but nevertheless she’d been hogtied and left laying on the couch, where she kept trying to wiggle off, much to Kara’s very verbal frustration.

Finally, there was Winn. Unlike the other three, somehow he’d retained more of his cognitive abilities, and the three attempts at taping him down had quickly ended in him adjusting to pull the tape off. Kara had, on her fourth attempt to restrain him, resorted to locking him in the bathroom and wedging her heavy oak dresser beneath the knob.

She could still hear the steady _clack-clack-clack_ of his continued attempts to break free, not that he appeared to be getting very far.

Addy wasn’t really sure what to do with herself. She’d been running through a small tasklist of sensory tuning protocols, just to see if she could identify the source of the mind control, to little success. That either pointed towards something that wasn’t broadcast at all, that she was dealing with something everyone had simultaneously digested and was now controlling them, or she was working with something deeply alien or very encrypted.

Which, as any sane person might understand, worried her. Observations on how those under the influence of the unknown controller pointed towards the entire thing being mostly compulsion based. Simplistic commands that people were unable to resist, as if it had been direct puppeting, that would’ve necessitated someone controlling every living human being in the local region simultaneously. She, personally, could do it; given a requisite amount of energy and some way to unnaturally amplify her range, but Addy was relatively certain little else could say the same.

That, combined with the fact that everyone was acting, broadly speaking, very stupid—that only Winn, for whatever reason, appeared to be capable of removing things preventing them from carrying out tasks, almost certainly reaffirmed the compulsion idea. She’d done plenty of personal research into compulsion-based control in previous cycles, there were limitations to it, but it was effective if you were constrained in terms of processing ability. Rather than control someone from the nervous system down, dictating every movement, every breath in or out, you could just simply get them to do the thing you wanted while they were unable to resist.

It just so happened that, if a compulsion was significantly strong enough, people started showing degrees of tunnel vision behaviour that only got worse the more absolute a compulsion was. If a being’s entire mind is devoted to a singular task, or at least the majority of it, the person will begin to forget to use basic tools that would expedite the process. The fact that Alex, among some of the more clever people Addy had the pleasure of meeting, could not fathom trying to free herself from the ropes and was instead trying very stubbornly to roll off of a couch while her sister repeatedly put her back on it, pointed towards a similar trend there.

Altogether, this meant that whatever was controlling people was vast, powerful, and nearly undetectable.

Thus, her justifiable fear towards actively trying to break it. Which she had relayed to Kara, and which was the reason why she was pacing back and forth, gnawing on her lip and looking very heartbroken about things. Addy could vaguely relate, in a distant sense, she understood what Kara was likely coming to terms with right now—that they needed to handle this problem before they could go out to find out what was causing it in the first place, and that required an attempt to subvert the control, which required her to choose someone to possibly risk being rendered braindead.

The worst part was, Addy had no real frame of reference for what the percentage chance of it was, outside of relatively low. That was the problem with psychic abilities and mind control—the sort of connections that did things like this, they weren’t easy to break, and more to the point, it was generally somewhat dangerous to do so. Having that degree of control over someone’s autonomy meant you were interfacing with some extremely important parts of the human brain, and having personally dealt with it herself, Addy was confident in saying that human brains were unfortunately very, very fragile and prone to never quite being able to be fixed if or when they break.

Which left them here. In limbo, while Kara paced and muttered and Addy tried not to count the grains on the ceiling as she leaned against the front door, looking for any sign of what exactly was controlling people.

If she’d known this sort of thing was coming, Addy was pretty sure she could’ve shielded them from it. It wasn’t preventing whatever was controlling them from doing so that was the danger, it was the sudden and abrupt removal of that control. Generally, as a rule, psychic interfacing was easier to prevent than it was to break in the moment, and significantly less costly to boot.

At this point, she was working through various interdimensional psychic frequencies, the sorts that she worked off of, not that she particularly expected to find it there.

Kara’s head snapped up again, and Addy watched her crane her neck around to stare at something off towards the big main window near the back of the apartment. For a moment, she was certain Kara would look away, but then she tilted her head, squinted, and breathed out noisily.

“There are two buildings on fire,” she said, almost blankly. “I think from people leaving their stoves on. I need to go and stop it before it spreads, because the fire department isn't responding to it.”

Addy nodded, slowly. “I can keep watch of them.” Though she wasn’t looking forward to being the one to stop Alex from falling onto the floor repeatedly.

“I—” Kara paused, swallowed again. “About the mind control, you said the chance was?”

She blinked. “Low, but not insignificant.” Which was about the best way to put it; there were too many unknowns to make an accurate statement to any end, but the fact that there _were_ unknowns in the first place was what made it so dangerous. If the control was deep-seated enough, and was sufficiently primed to retaliate in the event it felt another psychic presence near it, then the chance of damage to the brain was significant.

Kara nodded a bit jerkily, breathing in, then out. She reached for her cape - she’d switched into her suit not long after they’d tied the majority of her friends down - and toyed with the edge, pinching the fabric almost nervously. Her face was pale, eyes a bit too wide, and her lips were thinned out, slanted awkwardly—somewhere between a grimace, a resting face, and a frown.

She was guilty. Addy could see the signs of it, had lived through an endless deluge of stares like that in Taylor’s memories. Danny had been the generator of the vast majority of them, he had always been an apologetic man, and that hadn’t been helped any by the death of his wife and the brief period of neglect his child underwent as a consequence.

Kara was guilty, and scared, and worried, and tired. She was so many things.

But Addy could help.

“If you leave without telling me not to,” she said into the silence of the room, Kara jolting a bit, eyes flicking towards her. “I can choose someone to try to free their minds for you. If you just leave and don’t tell me not to.”

Addy liked people who could carry their own burdens, who would work through things. Taylor had been one of them, Taylor had all but been beholden to her emotional burdens and eager to add more to her back. She had snubbed every chance at an easy out, controlled by her need to prove herself worthy. Kara was the same, to a point, though she handled the emotional aspect of it significantly better, and had a proper support network to blunt the edge of that poor behavioural pattern.

Kara just stared at her for a moment, blank-faced, almost uncomprehending.

Addy just stared back, arm folded behind her back.

But then, Taylor hadn’t been given an out, all of that time ago. There were ones available, but none of them had ever been offered or considered. She didn’t have someone who could help her, who could do or make the tougher choices.

She could do that, now. It was far too late for Taylor, but not for Kara.

She could take those burdens.

“No, Addy,” Kara said, voice settling into something firm. It startled her, not that she let it show on her face. “No, this is—if this is a decision we make, we do it together.”

But. She could handle it, she could do those things, she could make others hurt less. She could be useful. “I—”

“If you thought you were about to cause something catastrophic to fail, could you stop it before it happened?” Kara interrupted, something in her voice having settled. Her shoulders were broad, she stared at her, eye-to-eye, and Addy had to resist the urge to cringe away from it. Her eyes were focused, her entire posture had changed, something about it was confident, more Kara, less the panicked woman she’d watched pace in place for the last fifteen minutes.

Shaking away the thoughts, Addy considered. “Possibly?” She was powerful, and had fine-detailed control, but part of the problem was that psychic retaliation was almost always near-instant. She’d need to be ready for it, if it happened, and it might happen the very second she initiated a connection with the other party. “They’d need to be someone I was more familiar with, that and someone possibly with a more durable mind, or at least someone who might be able to resist the influence to some degree.”

Kara’s head turned, and Addy followed it, her eyes ending up pointed towards the bathroom. The door shuddered against another attempt to open it, wood-on-wood clattering reaching her ears alongside the persistent rattle of a metal knob trying to be jarred free.

“We’re in this together,” Kara said, not looking away from the door. “So, we don’t have to, but if you think...”

Addy blinked, processed for a moment. Winn was important, not _important_ like Kara or Taylor, but getting up there. He had been supportive, had made her a suit, taught her things he knew she didn’t need but appreciated because she liked learning. He did a lot for her, even despite his misgivings about her abilities at times. That and what he called her ‘casual breach of privacy’ about his wallet, but they had been working on that too.

She could be responsible for the death of his mind if things went poorly. He could be taken out of her life. She could be separated from someone important again.

Kara’s hand came to rest on her stump, jolting Addy out of her thoughts. She’d approached at one point, and was looking up at her with something like quiet comfort on her face.

Addy swallowed, her throat was thick, it almost hurt.

“ _El mayarah_ —it means ‘stronger together’,” Kara began, her thumb drawing soothing little circles on the skin just below her shoulder. “It’s the motto of the house of El. Even if it's not official yet, you’re still a part of that, Addy. We make this decision together, we carry the burdens of the consequences together, so it can’t crush us.”

Addy breathed in, let it out. Her chest felt heavy, her head felt light. It was very distracting. She processed, and processed, and tried and ran the limited numbers over in her head, and—and...

“Alright,” she said, letting her breath out again. Kara’s hand stopped, rose to grip her shoulder firmly, before letting go.

Kara stepped forward and Addy followed after her, tracing the short path between the living area to Kara’s bedroom, and then to the sole washroom in the apartment. The sound of wood-on-wood, of metal rattling, was louder up close, more insistent, almost panicked. The knob would twist and turn at random, then the door would be pushed, ramming against the dresser. Almost like someone had made a list of steps on how to open a door - twist knob, push - and Winn was trying to follow them, albeit a half-step off rhythm.

Coming to a halt next to Kara, Addy felt her free hand get taken, fingers tightening around one another. She heard Kara mutter those words again, _el mayarah_ , a small whisper. It almost sounded like a prayer, like that time Taylor’s grandmother had come to visit and everyone had to say grace, almost reverent.

Addy accessed her coreself sluggishly, pulled open the connection. She felt the broadcast jump through the dimensional connection and then spread out from her. She shaped the exact specifics of her range, reduced it and turned it into a cone directed out from her front.

She brushed a psychic tendril over Winn’s mind, and let herself in.

* * *

The influence was obvious now that she was sensing it. The amygdala and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex were not so much shut down as they had been immensely stunted. Regions of the brain meant to moderate and allow for things like hope and optimism. From there, the remainder of the psychic frequency was used to apply a broad-reaching compulsion that she couldn’t quite decipher, but had something to do with relocating him to a nearby office building.

The reason she hadn’t been able to sense the frequency, as it would happen, was because it had been everywhere and nearly identical to the baseline frequency the world gave off. The frequency itself was being generated from electrical devices, primarily ones connected to the internet, though it did so clumsily. Not that she could see signs that a more direct operator was missing, that there was some unfinished piece of the psychic system itself. No, for all that it was powerful and subtle, it was simplistic, meant to fulfil tasks by accessing the personal memories of those under the influence and utilizing their expertise in the furthering of a project.

It was unguided, too. Less of a living psychic bandwidth as she was and more of a field, a blanket area it had under its own control. Someone was operating it, she was pretty sure, but not interfacing with it. She would have noticed a texture to it if they had, a signature that J’onn had—that even _she_ had. She was almost sure other people could sense them as well, but part of the reason why she could was that it was significantly less straining to have the ability to sense the variance between psychic presences among shards than it was to embed a personal signature with each broadcast and have someone process it once they received the data package.

It was not responding to her, because there was nobody there to respond to her with. The psychic frequency felt bland, like the equivalent of plastic; uniform in ways it was not when naturally occurring. It was technological in origin then, she guessed, or at least not something naturally produced.

She could subvert it too. Had she just tried to snap the connection, things might’ve gone bad. As she expected the compulsions were nestled deep into the brain at this point and abruptly removing them could have any number of side-effects, up to and including Winn suffering from long-term depressive episodes as a result of his brain learning how to operate certain parts of it again. He could’ve also struggled with a lasting compulsion to be somewhere, or even some neurological damage.

But that would’ve been if she’d simply snipped the connection. Now that she knew it was there, and it wasn’t responding to her presence in any meaningful capacity, she could do so much more. Reaching out to it, she adjusted her own frequency to match it, hiding just in case. It was hard to describe—there was nothing fundamentally physical about the process, but she still coaxed her own presence over top the other and began, simply, to subsume it, slipping into the cracks she ripped into it, replacing their control with her own, keeping the psychic system stable as she wore down the previous presence until the connection snapped altogether.

She took a brief glance over Winn’s brain to ensure nothing had been damaged before, finally, pulling herself free.

* * *

The first thing she noticed, coming back into focus, was that the door had stopped rattling. Kara was still holding her hand, but had started to lean forward, a bright look on her face, something like hope crawling over her features.

“Uh,” Winn’s voice said out from behind the door, sounding disoriented. “That was possibly the most uncomfortable thing I have ever experienced.”

Kara let out a crow of triumph, and Addy tried not to smile so hard.

* * *

“I’m not going to ask how you know how to tie a sheet bend knot,” Alex groused as Kara finished untying the rope around her arms, her fingers a blur of movement. “But couldn’t you have freed me first?”

James and Lucy were leaning against one-another off to the side, James a bit more frantically than Lucy, while Winn had set up his computer on the desk and was typing quickly into it, shoulders locked. Alex and Kara were sitting upright on the couch as the latter worked through the rope she’d wrapped around the former.

They were all under her influence, in a manner of speaking. She wasn’t actually doing much more than buffering their brain from the outside frequency of the mind control, which continuously pressed against everyone but herself and Kara, now that Addy could sense it. She wasn’t spending much, almost virtually _no_ energy from her body to do this, though she’d run out of the solar energy in her body in about three days, working from the assumption that she spent those three days sunbathing in clear weather, in any event.

The only downside was the range. She’d have to remain within about thirty-to-fifty feet of everyone to continue keeping them shielded from the presence. If her shielding broke, they would immediately fall back under the sway of the presence and begin to attempt to do as it willed them to, and that usually meant vanishing into the throng of people outside, which would make finding them again a significant difficulty.

The last rope around Alex’s torso fell, and the woman in question let out a noise of relief. “You tied them too tight,” she supplied a bit awkwardly, reaching up to rub at one of the reddish marks on her arm where the rope had bitten in. “That and this reminds me of McCormac.”

Kara, meanwhile, stared at her sister for a moment, face a perfect cast of ignorant innocence, before the words apparently settled in and her face wrinkled into disgust. “Ew!” She said, faking a gag and shoving her sister back into the couch, who let out a huff of laughter. “I didn’t need to even _think_ about that, what the hell Alex?”

“Not that I don’t like living vicariously through your healthy family dynamics, Kara,” Winn interrupted, glancing up from his laptop. “But uh, I think we need to talk about this.”

Alex’s posture tightened, turned rigid, and Kara nodded a bit solemnly, the faux horror falling from her face to be replaced by something almost tired.

Winn leaned back in his chair, typing something, before breathing out shakily. “Right, so, uh, whatever this is? It’s viral. Or at least, in National City. The frequency it is broadcasting to control us propagates through technology connected to the local internet provider, though going from the steady increase in range of about one meter per two-and-a-half hours, with slight acceleration, my best guess is that it’s going to continue expanding to cover the globe. It’s currently contained mostly to National City, and some of the fringe communities near the rural parts have even managed to escape it.”

He tapped his keyboard again. “Also, we’ve gone to national news. People have noticed, and they’re, well, _terrified_.”

“Well,” Kara began stiffly. “Do we have a name for it? Or like, at least a description? A goal?”

Winn nodded. “Myriad.”

Kara froze, face cast in something like horror. Alex, beside her, twitched violently at the word.

“...You have an idea of what this is?” Winn asked.

Kara shook her head, the motion jarring her expression, which twisted from horror to hate. “No, but I have a good enough idea of _who_ did it. Non.”

“Oh, Kryptonians,” Winn said, almost exasperatedly. “I could’ve told you that much, considering I now apparently have a passing grasp on _Kryptahniuo_.”

Kara’s head snapped around, blinking owlishly at him. “I never told you the proper name for the language,” she said, a bit dumbly.

Winn shrugged. “Yeah, and during my time feeling no hope I somehow managed to collect a vague understanding of the language. Did anyone else?”

James shook his head, Lucy just stared at Winn, and Alex looked bewildered.

Reaching up, Winn pinched the bridge of his nose. “So it’s either a _me_ thing or just because sometimes the self-propagating mind control frequency screwed up a little. Great. Totally won’t have existential anxiety about that. Anyway, we kinda have to deal with this before it spreads to consume the planet, any ideas on where to go from here? Or can I get back to trying to disrupt the entire thing?”

“Well,” Lucy interjected, speaking up. “I think we need a base of operations, and sorry, Kara, but your apartment isn’t going to work. We need to be somewhere well-connected, where we can keep an eye on things, possibly with a vantage point. If this is Non’s doing, it likely means the rest of the Kryptonian fighters he has are, like him, active. What else he has for resources? I don’t know, but I don’t think we can properly address even some of it without additional tools.”

“Okay,” James picked up the thread, nodding along. “So we need a place which has access to information feeds, is high enough that we can react if things start going wrong, and is centralized so that we’re not out of the way when things _do_ start going wrong. Anyone know somewhere like that? Because uh, I think we all do.”

Most of the room, Addy included, glanced Kara’s way.

Kara tilted her head, a thoughtful expression on her face. “It might work,” she agreed.

* * *

Arriving at CatCo proved to be a more tedious project than originally assumed. For starters, the original idea was for Kara and herself to take two people each and fly close to one another, but when that turned out to be impossible due to extra supplies Winn was bringing, they decided on walking. Of course, at that point, Lucy brought up the fact that since they weren’t packing light due to the restrictive nature of Kara and Addy’s vehicular restraints, they should probably get some supplies first, so they made a detour to Alex’s apartment - across the street, as it would turn out - to gather them.

With everything else, by the time they were riding the elevator up towards the CatCo offices, it was starting to get light out and everyone had at least one backpack. Addy had switched to her costume, going with the same configuration as the time before, but sans a faux arm - which she had left packed away in her backpack - due to how cumbersome it was. CatCo elevators, as Addy had come to learn, were not suited to contain 6 well-packed individuals, and as a result the entire ride was unpleasantly cramped.

Addy was the first out of the elevator when the doors finally opened, stumbling out in a rush just to give herself some space. There were people here, Kara had informed them as much, but none of them even looked her way. All of them were seated at their desks, typing mindlessly, Kryptonian pictographs scrolling across the screen in rhythm to the tap of a notably very English keyboard.

Kara, the next out, eased the backpack she’d been wearing off of her back and quickly marched up to her desk, dropping it on the surface. “Right,” she said quickly, Addy listening to her as she turned her head to watch Lucy, James, Alex and Winn file out of the elevator behind her, looking various shades of disgruntled. “I have to go and stop several fires, please don’t leave this building?”

“Kara,” Alex started, only to quickly close her mouth at the glare Kara sent her way.

“Alex, I need to do this,” she said, almost quietly. “Not only is the city starting to burn down, but it’s not just office buildings anymore, and nobody’s doing anything to stop—”

The elevator dinged.

Everyone, including Addy, turned as Cat’s private elevator in particular peeled open, golden doors ceding as the titular woman herself strut out. Kara looked completely gobsmacked, probably for good reasons considering she claimed to have some of the most powerful senses on the planet and regularly used it to keep track of important people’s heartbeats.

Cat, not knowing any of this, with her sunglasses on her face and a thermos of coffee in one hand, just strut past. They all watched her in complete silence as she missed Kara, missed everyone staring at her, and made a straight line for her office, reaching up to take a sip out of her thermos. She prowled around her desk, tugged her chair out, and eased herself down onto it, placing her thermos to the side as she began to pick through her purse.

“...Miss Grant?” Kara said weakly.

Cat glanced up from her purse at that, sunglasses sliding down the length of her nose until her eyes were peeking over the rim. “Supergirl,” she said, sounding a bit surprised. “Rather early for a visit. Is there something I can do for you? Maybe an inter—”

“How is she—” Winn started to say, before—

“Miss Grant, people are currently being mind-controlled,” Kara explained thinly, sounding almost frustrated. “You haven’t noticed?”

Cat spared a glance around the office, eyes flashing to Addy before flicking away just as quick. “A bit more quiet than usual,” she conceded, placing her purse down. “But I’m not sure what you’re saying, Supergirl.”

“I’m _saying_ —” Kara began haltingly, only for her voice to cut off as her phone gave a rather loud _beep_. Scrambling, she hauled her phone out of her pocket, ignoring Cat’s “ _so you do have a phone, can I get the number?_ ” as she flicked through it. After a moment, a relieved smile spread across her features. “That was Kal—er, Superman. He said he was on his way over to help, he saw the news.”

Without even waiting for Cat to respond, Kara was quick to jog towards the balcony. Glancing behind her, Addy shared a look with the rest of the group before inclining her head, moving to follow Kara. Wordlessly, James, Alex, Lucy and Winn trailed after her, all of them spilling out of the small door and onto the balcony, Cat already there, at Kara’s side, glancing into the horizon with a squint.

“I can see him!” Kara said brightly, her smile growing wider.

Addy caught sight of him, then, a little black dot on the horizon, growing rapidly larger. The closer he got, the more she could make out about how the colours of his costume reflected against the light.

Then, just as quick as he’d arrived, his distant figure _dropped_. Landing on the street below, still thick with a throng of ambling people, all making their way to destinations unknown, he moved in lock-step with everyone else, vanishing into the crowd.

“Oh my god,” Cat muttered, sounding horrified.

James behind her made a noise, drawing Addy’s gaze. He had a hand to his mouth, eyes blown wide in a panic, pupils growing larger. He turned, rushing towards something, only for Lucy to take hold of his arm, stopping him with a sharp grunt.

Addy inched back a few steps, just to keep a good buffer between James and the fringe of her range.

Lucy and James devolved into a whispered, snappish argument that Addy didn’t even try to tune into. Finally, after some more whispering, Lucy _gently_ led James towards one of the unoccupied offices, glancing Addy’s way before closing the door behind them. She took a few steps towards it, again, to give herself something of a buffer.

“If it’s affecting Superman, then are any of us safe?” Cat’s voice said from somewhere behind her, sounding almost panicked.

“Miss Grant,” Kara tried, her voice smooth, attempting at soothing. “Please calm down, we can—”

“Don’t _tell_ me what I can or can’t do, _Kara_ ,” Cat snapped back.

Everyone went silent. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Kara fumbled, eyes flicking between Cat and Alex. “I—”

“Kara it’s a ponytail and some thick glasses I am not that stupid,” Cat interjected sharply. “I know about Addy too, or at least I have a pretty good idea—”

“But you saw me with Su—Kara!” Kara tried, again.

Cat made a noise of frustration. “And not two days later we were running an article about the ethics of illegal immigration and included in that was an interview with a _shapeshifting alien_ , Kara. I’m not that stupid.”

“Well,” a new voice interrupted, and Addy jolted around, coming nearly face-to-face with Maxwell Lord. He was wearing his normal suit, though this time there was a metal device of some kind tucked into the space above his ear. “I may not be Superman, but I’m not stupid either. Matter-of-fact, you can thank me for this city not being overrun by aliens, actually.”

A closer inspection of Maxwell Lord pointed towards some inconsistencies. While his suit was clean, his skin wasn’t, with bruising around his neck, dirt and soot smudges, alongside other signs of wear and tear. His eyes were bagged, with bruises under each, and his upturn lick of hair was more of a messy bush.

Alex’s hand reached to where her gun was, and Maxwell, accordingly, brought both hands up in a silent surrender.

“You’re supposed to be at the D.E.O.,” Alex said darkly, fingers brushing against the ridge of her gun. “In prison. _With the rest of them_.”

“Yeah, well,” Maxwell shrugged. “I had designed this”—he tapped the metal node just above his ear—“because I figured out what they were going to do in the first place. The D.E.O. wanted to see where it would go, so they let me keep it. When this whole, mind control thing happened? Well, I was equipped for it. Turns out, Non thought I was an alien pretending to be a human, or was unaware of his ancestry, because I was unaffected. Said something about Trombusans? I faked my allegiance to him, he let me out, and I destroyed the central control system for your black-ops prison to prevent the majority of the prisoners from being released. That and it put the entire facility in lockdown, so none of the highly-trained agents can be unleashed to commit mass murder.”

He made a stiff bow, all mocking, though the way he winced probably meant it hadn’t been a great decision on his behalf.

“You’re welcome,” he said dryly, correcting his posture. “I only got nearly shot twice and strangled by a neurotic woman obsessed with Superman. Thank god for all of that alien tech you’re withholding from the rest of the public, turns out she was only _mostly_ durable.”

“What do you want?” Kara said, instead, looking tired.

Maxwell sighed, glancing at Addy for a moment before returning the totality of his focus onto Kara. “I want, _Kara_ , to stop the world from ending. And, turns out, I prepared exactly for it.”

* * *

“Why am I not surprised that you of all people survived the apocalypse?” Cat drawled, settling into her seat at the far end of the meeting room. “You know what they say, cockroaches will outlive us all.”

Maxwell, up near the front of the room, scribbling on a whiteboard with Winn in tow, glanced back. “It’s lovely to see you too, Cat,” he drawled, voice pitched in just the right way to make Addy feel viscerally uncomfortable. “You look amazing, considering the end is nigh. Do you like those earrings I sent you?”

Cat just glared, fixing her gaze on him in a way that might almost be called hateful. Maxwell, not to be deterred, just returned to his work, quickly glancing over something Winn had written down before giving the man in question a nod, underlining a few words. "I do," she said, reaching up to fiddle with the object in question. It was a thumb-sized pale-green rock attached to a gaudy golden fixture.

"Well," Maxwell started, pausing. "That's the only reason why you're not a mindless drone. Ion blockers and all that."

Addy watched the byplay awkwardly, fiddling with the hem of her costume. She was seated nearest to Alex, who was busy texting her mother on her phone. Across the table from her were James and Lucy, who had returned looking much more composed and put-together than they had originally when leaving her range of focus, though James still looked wan and terrified when he thought nobody was looking.

Kara was near the door, arms folded over her chest, staring suspiciously at Maxwell Lord.

“So!” Maxwell announced, stepping away from the board. “As you all well know, good ol’ uncle Non broke into my lab over Christmas. You know how it is, you guys came asking about it, I stonewalled you, and so on.”

Reaching up with his marker, Maxwell circled the big letters ‘LTE’. “Now, the reason why he broke in at all was to get to this, my LTE interface system. I found a way to prevent it from affecting me, as you can see with this handy-dandy ion blocker. In most cases, if hostile action against myself and my property had been taken, I could simply take control of the satellite myself and remove the threat. Unfortunately for everyone, since our planet has apparently become a hotspot for aliens, whatever tech they used to take my satellites over? I can’t decode on my own, or in any reasonable length of time, and I can’t even bring it down with failsafe measures since my satellites are supported by some of the best shielding technology against both kinetic and electro-magnetic bombardment, so bar a nuclear warhead being detonated in-orbit we’re not going to be able to take it down the easy way.”

Abruptly, James nearly leapt to his feet, chair clattering. “Then why the fuck are we even talking about this?!” He yelled, staring at Maxwell angrily, his face bunched so tightly Addy was sure he was about to curl his lip and snarl. “Superman’s—my _best friend_ is under this thing’s control!”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Maxwell replied dismissively, barely sparing James a glance.

“Need I remind you that you had me beaten not that long ago, _Max_?” James sniped back.

“Enough,” Alex interrupted, voice firm. Both James and Maxwell turned to look at her. “What are our options, Maxwell, get to the point. James, sit down.”

James dropped back down into his seat, hands coming up to press into his eyes.

“Well, we have a few,” Maxwell started, diplomatically. “The one I recommend? I have kryptonite ordinances, and the easiest way to get Myriad to stop is to just kill the people perpetuating it. Detonating a bomb filled with powdered kryptonite over National City should kill every Kryptonian in it and by extension end the threat of Myriad.”

“What about Superman?” Kara interrupted sharply.

Maxwell rolled his eyes. “You fly in before the bomb goes off and drag him out of the city limits. You and him won’t be able to return for, eh, fifty years, give or take, but it’s a small price to pay.”

“And what of the blood price, Lord?” Cat said, cutting through the low murmur of conversation. The room went quiet, and Maxwell turned towards her, smiling guilelessly.

“What do you mean?” He asked, oh-so-carefully.

Cat’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t bullshit me, Maxwell. How many people are expected to die because you detonated a bomb full of radioactive dust over the city limits?”

Maxwell’s expression thinned. “Eight percent of the population.”

“That is over _three-hundred thousand people_ , Max,” Cat didn’t so much snarl, but there was an edge to her voice, a sharp one thick with vitriol and distrust. It was the sort of voice that Addy knew people expected Cat to act like, cold and calculative and almost mocking in her critique of others. “Is that a low or high estimate, Max? What about long-term effects, surely you would know if there _were_ any, seeing as you’re offering to pull the trigger and irradiate a city of four million.”

“He should,” Alex interrupted, eyes narrowing into slits. “Considering he’s been playing around with red kryptonite for a while. Ever wonder why Kara went ballistic? There’s your answer.”

Maxwell held his hands up, waiting until everyone stopped muttering. “Now, look, not to be the bigger man in this instance, but... I would take three hundred thousand losses over some alien _despot_ taking over seven billion people.”

“What about a program?” Winn asked from the whiteboard. “We could remotely infect your satellites—”

“Tried that,” Maxwell interjected with a shake of his head. “My tech trumps me. It’s built that way.”

“We have both you and Winn,” Kara pointed out, her voice a stubborn rasp. Addy didn’t like it, but understood that it was what Kara was feeling, what she had to process. “We can figure something out, we don’t need to kill three-hundred thousand people.”

Maxwell glanced her way, expression bordering on caustic. “Are you sure it’s not because you won’t be able to fetch cats out of trees anymore, _Supergirl_? Do you really want to roll the dice on whether or not _whatever_ Non is working up to won’t be fulfilled before we can find some way around cutting-edge security tech I purpose-built to deal with the new heightened tech base of our planet?”

Kara’s face twisted to mirror his, looking heated, angry. “I don’t _care_ whether or not I can stay in National City afterwards, Maxwell! I love this city, I love working here, I love being Cat Grant’s assistant but Rao! If me leaving would save this place I would do it in a heartbeat! I might not want to have to give up another planet but I am more worried about the people dying than I am my ability to be a superhero!”

Breathing heavily, Kara petered off, her face slipping into something like shame.

Maxwell’s own expression softened minutely, so minuscule Addy barely noticed it, but it got rid of that smarm to him, the insufferable smugness that made Addy want to hurt him. “I’m sorry, that was low,” he started, reaching up to smooth his hand over his face. He looked tired, at a closer glance. “It’s... this is the end of the world as we know it if it gets out. There’s no containing Myriad if it begins to spread through systems less secure than mine. He’ll have continental control in very little time, and move on to worldwide shortly thereafter. Most of humanity will be his pawns, and the ones who aren’t will have to live in secrecy, hiding at all times.”

Bringing his hand back down, Maxwell stared at them all, going from Winn, to Cat, to Kara. His gaze lingered on Addy for a while, longer than anyone else, and something about the way he was staring didn’t feel probing, or even remotely hostile, just... inquisitive. Curious. If sad.

“The bombs are a guarantee,” he explained flatly. “If they go off, Myriad _stops_. If I can get permission to deploy them from the government, Myriad is done the second it detonates. There is no room for error, no possible unfixable problems, and despite everything else three-hundred thousand people dying to ensure the rest of us don’t become mind-controlled slaves is I think a positive. A very hard to accept one, but it’s better than the alternative.”

“I can’t just let you _kill_ people,” Kara said, sounding so, so very fretful.

“Then you have to decide whether or not you can overcome your own morals for a guaranteed chance of fixing things,” Maxwell started, staring long and hard at her, the softness bleeding away from him as his expression grew tighter, harsher. “Or you have to take the chance that your refusal to bend will cause the end of the world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mom's out for oral surgery today, so here's hoping that goes well for her, and is part of the reason why this chapter is again another one more focusing on interpersonal stuff and build up.
> 
> Anyhow, hope you enjoyed.


	20. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 18

It wasn’t hard to tell that Maxwell’s statement had left an impact. Addy liked to believe that she was getting better at ‘reading the room’, for lack of a better term. The way people tensed, the way they spoke, the stiffness in their gestures and the way neutral faces weren’t perfectly neutral—they were all little hints towards the general mood of any one space.

The mood, she observed, was bleak.

Alex had wandered off to one end of the meeting room not long following it, after first pausing to tell them she needed to call her mother. She was still there - Addy could feel her through the rudimentary shielding connection - pacing back and forth, all but whispering into the side of her smartphone.

Kara had left not long after, wordless and silent, stalking towards one window and, like her sister, pausing only to inform them that she needed to prevent the city from burning down. Addy had watched the blur of red and blue fade off towards an increasingly smoke-thick horizon until she couldn’t see her anymore, lingering just to be sure that she wouldn’t drop towards the ground like Clark.

Cat hadn’t really responded to anything after hearing Maxwell’s proclamation, eyes fixed on her tablet as she tapped fingers swiftly across it, expression focused.

Lucy and James had lapsed into an awkward silence. James had looked torn, vehemently twisted, like he couldn’t and would not accept Maxwell’s prognosis. He’d spent the last half-an-hour glaring hostile daggers at the man, not that Maxwell himself seemed particularly bothered by any of it. Lucy had been more sombre, quiet, lower lip caught beneath the top row of her teeth, fingers tracing nonsensical patterns on the table, focused on something nobody else could see.

Winn was, somehow, the most dramatic out of the lot. Where before he’d been just about rubbing shoulders with Maxwell, now he kept his distance, a minimum of five or six feet between the two of them, only slipping back in to scribble errant notes onto the whiteboard. His face was, like Lucy’s, deep in thought, but Addy wasn’t particularly fond of the cast to it, the way his lips tugged down in the universal display of sadness, the way his expression felt almost hopeless.

Addy knew what she was feeling too, which was a rather pleasant surprise. Normally, the only things she could really identify out of the complicated moods she would slip into would be the baser emotions, things she had plenty of context for with Taylor’s memories. Anger, sadness, guilt, grief—loud emotions, she wanted to call them. Things that did not just come in small doses, but rather overpowered her.

She wasn’t really feeling any of that right now. No, she was feeling _frustrated_. She had felt it before, albeit without the chemical slurry that made everything so complicated and _intense_ , back when she had been just her coreself. Her own lack of agency, the vexation of being unable to impart changes that would help, the hopeless sense that she was just an observer, that attempts to rectify that would always fail.

The Warrior had crippled more than just her ability to interface and dictate the behaviours of her kin, after all. Some shards might get away with being able to send feelings or impulses towards their hosts, the ones who the Warrior didn’t spare too much focus on. Buds were especially notorious for that, to an extent unshackled due to their advanced degree of knowledge on host-to-passenger interfacing that they had taken from the original they had splintered from, letting them get closer, impart more onto their hosts.

But as she had been designated Queen Administrator, it meant that the Warrior could not just let her be. It had carved off not only the majority of the fixtures she used to interface with shards, leaving only enough behind for a power-influenced trigger to be possible, but also the majority of the tools she had used to interface with her kin, relay information, _intent_. She had been left with a crippled power nexus and no way to influence her host outside of the powers she gave out and some subtle mental conditioning.

Yet, here she was. She couldn’t leave without risking the continued wellbeing of four people she had varying levels of interest in, and she had nothing to offer. That really was the problem, too, she could not interface with Myriad - she _had_ tried, the connection as it would seem was only one-way; she couldn’t follow it back to the source psychically - and there were no easy problems to directly circumvent. She did not have the requisite tools to alter her current abilities into that of a Tinker’s, which meant she could not aid Winn - and Maxwell - in their attempts to figure out ways to subvert Myriad’s control without having to irradiate a city of four million.

It was all very, very frustrating and she very much disliked being frustrated. She disliked it almost as much as being bored, which only won out over it as the very state of boredom was torturous to her. She wanted to help, she wanted to fix things, she wanted Kara back and she didn’t want the stakes of another planet to rest on the shoulders of a small group of severely unequipped individuals, among which one option might be to commit to a scorched earth project and fire off wide-area ballistic weaponry in the vague hopes that, if they kill the person commanding the program, the program can either be shut down by a team on-site or the program itself would simply cease functioning in the event that the one operating it did too.

It felt like the time leading up to the fight with the Warrior again, even when she knew, had even gone so far as to calculate, that this situation was a distant second to that threat. It made her nervous, it made her want to pace, want to fidget in a way that wasn’t nice, not like when she needed to tap her shoes against something to get the energy out of her knees. It felt like the sort of twitchiness that makes you flinch away from things or intrusions, a steady increase in the pressure along her spine that made her feel oddly spring-loaded.

Things were getting out of her control, and that was unacceptable.

Placing one hand on the table, Addy eased herself to her feet. She felt Alex’s pacing grind to a halt, saw out of the corner of her eye James’ head craning around to stare at her.

“We need to do something,” she said, voice level.

Winn jolted, so did Maxwell, nearly in sync. Winn was the first to flick his head around, staring at her, while Maxwell took his time, dragging his focus from the whiteboard and, finally, to her.

“Addy,” Winn started, voice wobbly. “We’re still working on it, you need to be patient.”

She pushed down on the low flutter of annoyance that came with those words. _She_ was more patient than the entire collective existence that could be defined as _humanity_ ; she was the living embodiment of patience. “Kara is out there doing things,” she pointed out, keeping her voice as steady as she could manage. “We can do things. Sitting around is achieving nothing other than wasting time.”

“While I appreciate the spirit,” Cat interrupted, still not looking up from her tablet. “Unfortunately, myself and the cockroach near the whiteboard are the only two people who can be outside of, what was it?”

Addy blinked. “Thirty-to-fifty feet, with the last twenty having the chance of wild variations in potency, some to the point of risk.”

Cat’s mouth pinched and she flicked her gaze up, staring at Addy’s face, but not at her eyes, and then back down to her tablet. She appreciated it. “Yes, that. The point is, if you want to go and help Kara protect the city, we’re going to have to find a closet big enough to fit four people in it and with said closet being reinforced enough to stop them from breaking the door down the second you’re more than fifty feet away. There _is_ probably a closet that can manage that, but frankly, my employees are already zombie-like enough as-is, I’d rather not have that get any worse.”

“Is everything a joke to you?” James cut in, ignoring Lucy’s attempt to hush him.

Cat levelled her gaze squarely at him. “Mr. Olsen, I apologize if the way I remain calm and collected in stressful environments is to make the occasional joke at the expense of my workforce and is not, instead, throwing a tantrum as an adult, such as yourself. Next time I am unduly stressed in a meeting, I will flip the table and start passive-aggressively insulting people.”

James opened his mouth, face twisting.

Cat’s eyes narrowed.

Addy, again, drawing from Taylor’s experiences, brought a closed hand down onto the table with enough force to make it shake.

Everyone jolted. Alex hissed out a litany of curses, and Addy could even vaguely feel - and to an extent, hear - her stumble forward, narrowly avoiding dropping her phone.

All eyes trained themselves onto her, and Addy ignored the nervousness her brain was forcing on her, readied her explanations, channelled as much Taylor as she could manage without copious amounts of insects, and stared directly at them. “Don’t.”

James, seeing wisdom for the first time since she’d met him, breathed out and nodded shakily in her direction, slumping down in his seat. “Sorry,” he managed to get out, reaching up with one hand to palm at his forehead. “Superman’s—his status, it’s... freaking me out.”

Cat, too, took a step back, her posture slumping a bit more, losing the edge it carried. “Yes, well, today isn’t my best day either,” she said absently, eyes flicking back down to her tablet as she tapped her way through it. “You can imagine that finding out my child is under mind control and that forcefully removing it might lead to him being permanently disabled as a consequence may be a bit... difficult for me to process.”

Addy could, abstractly. Or at least if she used Taylor’s memories surrounding Dinah she could get a rough approximation of the chemical composition that the thoughts invoked. Anger, fear, desperation, other things she was significantly less well-versed in.

“I don’t want to go out and help Kara,” Addy said, finally, working the words around in her head. They didn’t feel right, didn’t encompass everything. She loathed her inability to broadcast concepts to other people, if only out of fear that their brains could not comfortably process it without undergoing an aneurysm. “I want to help, however is possible and within my abilities.”

“In that case,” Alex spoke up, Addy glancing back to find her a few paces away, phone clutched tightly in one hand at her side. “We need a game plan, things we can fix at the moment. What are our current problems?”

“My range,” Addy said, simply.

Winn raised his hand, almost awkwardly. “There are still people around, if we’re attacked, we’ll need to protect them too, no matter what they’re typing onto those computers.”

“We have a missing Kryptonian under mind control and I’m not even sure if Non knows about it,” Maxwell said, still not looking away from the whiteboard. “My guess is that they don’t, though, considering CatCo isn’t currently a bubbling, molten husk.”

“You do realize they have enough Kryptonians to do that on their own anyway?” Lucy cut in, staring flatly at him. “It’s not like they need Superman. Non’s a Kryptonian, all of his lieutenants are too.”

Maxwell opened his mouth, paused, and then tilted his head, finally glancing back at them. “That does raise a good question, though, why aren’t they attacking us right now if that’s the case? Superman, as far as I can tell, is only under their control because he was raised by humans on Earth—unlike Supergirl, he doesn’t have many of those alien thought patterns running around in his head to prevent the connection in the first place. If they wanted us gone, they could just send in one of the several other Kryptonians.”

“They don’t know we’re here,” Cat said, sounding almost bewildered by the notion. “You’d think they would, if they’re controlling everyone—but, they don’t know we’re here, do they?”

“Not unless they’re trying to make us think that,” Maxwell was quick to interject, drawing a series of glares from about half the room. He raised both hands in another show of cowardly, belly-showing surrender. “I was just pointing out that the possibility _is_ there.”

“Putting all of that aside,” Alex interrupted, sounding tired. “What from that list can we tackle?”

“Not my range,” Addy said, before anyone else could derail things again. “It’s fixed, currently, unless I was to obtain a power source and find a way to move it to my coreself’s dimension, it will have to remain this small to avoid an exponential increase in power.”

“The people?” Lucy started, tilting her head to one side in a way that reminded Addy distantly of a curious cat. “I mean, we all know how we acted—wouldn’t they just... leave if we unplugged the computers?”

There was a moment of silence.

“God, I’m stupid,” James let out, burying his face in both hands. “We just remove the reason why they’re here and they should leave, shouldn’t they?”

They should. Addy wasn’t totally sure if they wouldn’t just attempt to turn it back on, but then they hadn’t shown, outside of Winn, the ability to do complicated, detail-oriented tasks like that. It was more likely that most would view an ‘off’ computer as just an inert object, without relevance to their current task, and attempt to find a computer elsewhere.

Glancing towards Winn, who was notably quiet, staring off into the middle distance with something like a dawning epiphany stretching across his face, Addy was relieved to find she was almost certain nobody else was on par with him in terms of esoteric thought patterns and general intelligence. If there was, well, they could be restrained and locked in a small room, as they had done with Winn, but the majority should be much more like how Alex and Lucy had behaved, possibly even more simple.

“So we should probably tackle that first,” Alex interrupted, glancing towards the office space. Addy followed her gaze, stared at the sight of people she knew tangentially stuck in their seats, typing rapidly on a computer, Kryptonian glyphs scrolling across the screen. “I don’t see any part of the UI which points to an ‘off’ button,” she said.

“Well, then how do we turn it off?” Winn cut in, sounding frustrated.

Alex, to her credit, did not gawk at Winn, but she looked at him like she had looked at Addy during their weird drive home that one time. Exasperated, but not surprised. “We unplug it.”

“What?!” Winn nearly screeched, sounding horrified at the notion. “Bu—but all of those technical failures that come from pulling the plug on in-use computers aren’t like, made up, you know?!”

“Winfrey,” Cat interrupted, voice almost harsh. “If it will shut your rambling _up,_ I’ll pay to get every last damn computer in this building replaced.”

Winn stared at her awkwardly. “But I’ll still have to reconfigure it,” he said slowly. “That and it’s still mistreating valuable tech.”

Addy pushed down on an odd feeling in her chest. It felt like a yawn, but not, and it had been accompanied by a faint sense of frustration. Not the sharp, hateful kind she had been dealing with, but rather something more muted and distant. She tapped her chest a few times, just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of biological failing. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

“And I’ll pay you overtime to do it,” Cat grit out, sounding exasperated. “We don’t have time to learn Krypto-whatever to find whatever dumb string of moon runes would make the program shut the computer off. This isn’t Daft Con or _whatever_ you call that dumb convention, people aren’t going to bully you because you had to pull the plug on a piece of company hardware to help stop the end of the world.”

“...DEFCON,” Winn corrected, sounding awkward. “It’s, uh, DEFCON.”

Cat’s eyes just about rolled up into her head. “Winscott, I sincerely don’t care. Just go do it, or I will go out there _myself_ and start chucking monitors out the windows.”

Winn’s head snapped around to stare at her pleadingly, almost panicking. Addy wasn’t particularly sure how to feel about the fact that his numb state-of-mind could be overwhelmed by threats of damage against technology, but then Winn often had very skewed priorities.

Nudging her chair back, Addy glanced around the table. “We are moving back to the main office,” she announced, and made sure that there was no room for miscommunication in her tone.

She caught Cat smiling at her, almost proudly, before she promptly hid it behind the lip of her tablet.

* * *

Lucy’s theory turned out to be true, and so had Addy’s, to a certain degree. Nobody in the office exhibited odd or sophisticated behavioural patterns, all responding roughly in the same way: once the computer’s plug was pulled, they would rise from their seats and proceed towards either the elevators or the stairs if all elevators were in-use or not readily available.

Kara arrived back, soot-licked but not wounded, about half-way through the process, easing herself in through one of the tall windows that framed the main office area. Addy listened to her land after glancing back at the computer she was about to unplug, the sound of the heels of her boots click-and-clacking against the ground. It was a relief in one way, but not relieving in so many others; she liked that Kara was safe, but the fact that Kara had to be safe in the first place worried her.

Shaking her head, Addy reached forward, ignoring the steady swell of unnecessary concerns in her head, and pulled the plug free from the wall. Turning back towards the computer, she watched as Georgie’s hands stopped on the keyboard in an instant. The older woman had always been kind to her, always sparing a bright smile, endlessly exuberant in a way only Kara had really been able to match in the past.

Glazed, unfocused eyes slid right over her, the woman turning her head in one smooth motion, rising from her seat with almost robotic stiffness, and began to make her way towards the elevators.

Addy tried to keep it from hurting her.

“So we’re evacuating people?” Kara asked from somewhere behind her.

Cat made a low noise in her throat, distinct from anyone else by the way she let it roll into a sigh. “Yes, Kara. Lucy brought up that they’d likely just leave if we unplugged the computers, and we all figured it would be safer if there were as few people here as possible.”

Addy rolled the power cord up into a loop, just like Winn had taught her, and folded the forked plug between the layers, tightening it with a tug, before letting it limply hang from the back of the computer tower.

“Smart,” Kara agreed, though she sounded uneasy. “The fires are all out now, or at least the ones I can hear or see. There were a few close calls—I don’t think Myriad accounts for hazardous environments when it sends people to access computers, but nobody died, thank Rao.”

“Thank Rao,” Cat echoed, speaking the words as though she was tasting them on her tongue.

Stretching herself back into a full stand, Addy turned on her heel, catching sight of Kara again. She had smoothed her hair back, tucking it over one shoulder, and her face had a few bits of soot smudged across the surface, places where she’d clearly tried to clean it off. Cat was across from her, one arm tucked under an outstretched arm, a glass of an amber-coloured fluid - _whisky_ , Taylor’s memories informed her - sloshing around inside as she made calculated circles with her wrist.

“I’m sorry I never told you, Miss Grant,” Kara said slowly, one hand reaching down to fidget with her cape again. “I just—I didn’t want to be fired. CatCo was so much to me, it was a place to just be... _me_. Be helpful.”

Cat brought the glass up to her lips, taking a small sip. Her face twisted into a grimace at the taste, and she very pointedly set the glass down on the nearest table to her. “It’s fine, Kara. I figured it out early enough anyway, and we all have our secrets, don’t we?”

From the way Kara’s eyes lit up in recognition and she nodded, Addy was clearly missing something, but she felt it pertinent not to interrupt their moment.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Winn. “I might, uh, have an idea?”

Kara’s head snapped around to him, seated where he normally did his work. Cat’s head turned more slowly, almost like her namesake, and she blinked slowly at him.

She could feel James, Alex and Lucy turning in their various spots throughout the office where they had been helping unplug computers and usher people out.

Maxwell wasn’t hard to find, having dragged the whiteboard-on-wheels out into the office area and was still busily going over his math. As far as she could tell, he was right, but when she’d tried to tell him as much, he’d ignored her. Still, even his steady motions paused, shoulders tightening.

“So, uh, you’ll have to hear me out here, okay? This might sound ridiculous, maybe even blasphemous, depending on what your religion is?”

“Winn,” Cat cut in sharply, using his actual name for the first time since, well, _ever_. “Point. Get to it.”

Shakily nodding, Winn smiled awkwardly. “So, uh, that thing you mentioned before, about uh—alien thoughts, how Superman didn’t make the cut because he didn’t think alien enough. All that? It made me think, well, what if we’re going about this wrong? We can’t cut the connection off, but what if we change what it recognizes as a target?”

That was... plausible. Possible. More than what they had now, even. Addy opened her mouth to comment—

“Still runs into the problem that we can’t _get around my own security features!_ ” Maxwell barked sharply, snapping around. His face was angry, twisted up in frustration. “That’s all well and dandy, but how can we access it?!”

Winn didn’t even balk. Which was incredibly surprising, considering this was Winn and he startled like a rabbit more often than not. “Well, what if we use Indigo’s corpse?”

“I’m sorry,” Cat cut in again. “But I must be missing something, because corpses aren’t computers?”

“This one is,” Addy managed to get out, running the idea over in her head. It was possible, she could already see where he was going with this, considering Indigo’s capacity to interface with technology—while she couldn’t trace the signal back to the source with her psychic abilities, Indigo had shown the capacity to jump through something as rudimentary as a phone signal.

“Unfortunately,” Maxwell continued, his voice thick and prickly. “I put the damn D.E.O. facility into _lockdown_ , Winn, it’s not going to work—”

“It’s not at the desert base,” Alex almost yelled from somewhere behind her, something like excitement in her voice. “It’s in the city one!”

Kara jolted. “Wait, the what?”

“The city facility,” Maxwell echoed, sounding almost bitter. “It’s one of the skyscrapers, you fly by it basically daily.”

“You’d know, huh?” Alex said, voice dripping with malicious glee. “We sure dragged you in there for three unscheduled interrogations, didn’t we?”

Maxwell turned to stare at her, the mask fully dropping away. He looked angry, hostile, like he was about to throw something at her. “I am an _American citizen_ ,” he hissed sharply, pointing his marker at her. “I have rights, and your branch of the government continues to infringe on them by dragging me away in a _black van_ every couple of hours! Three times! You interrupted one of my board meetings, I lost millions of dollars because of you and I cannot even fucking sue!”

“ENOUGH!” Kara yelled, voice loud enough to almost deafen.

Alex’s mouth jarred shut.

Maxwell glared towards one of the walls.

“You were saying, Winn?” Kara said, after another moment to catch her breath.

Winn’s smile came out far shakier, much more nervous. “Right so, uh, if I can get Indigo’s body—cube, thing, I can download a program into it and inject it remotely into Myriad to first change the specifications of the control. Myriad will adjust, removing itself from people without hurting them, hopefully, and attempt to find new targets, and then the secondary program will activate and promptly brick the entire thing beyond any repair.”

“Is that possible? Getting Indigo’s... cube, I mean?” Kara asked, glancing towards her sister.

Alex’s face tightened for a moment, before smoothing over. “I think so, I’ll have to keep you on-call to guide you through the passwords and such but... I know where it is in the HQ base and nobody there should have Kryptonite bullets or anything. It should be... not safe, but easier than an attack on the desert facility, considering we keep prisoners there, some of which may be released.”

“I can help,” Addy said without thinking, without even hesitating. People turned to look at her, Maxwell especially, who looked wary at the notion. “I have Indigo’s specifications in my brain, I have properly decompiled a good portion of the Coluan architecture, which would speed up the process of understanding it.”

Winn inclined his head, hope flickering on his face. Addy thought it looked good on him to be hopeful, to be anything but weary and tired and scared. “Yeah, I already had a virus—before you, er, killed her, we intended to inject that, but the virus itself is only special because it can interface with her body. With your knowledge and some uh, help from Mr. Lord, it should be easy to adjust it to use the body as an injection method, rather than targeting it directly.”

“And how long will this take?” Maxwell interrupted, breathing steadily. “An hour? Four? Five? We might not have the time. I can get permission to set that bomb off in the hour, do we really want to bet on this? My option is a _guarantee_ , why—why can’t we just go with what will work?”

“For the love of god, Maxwell,” Cat snapped, glaring at him. “Stop getting so excited about killing hundreds of thousands of people with a dirty bomb. For fucks sake, we have an alternative plan that will _work_ without your bomb, what is keeping you so hung up on it?”

“He wants a place where Kryptonians can’t go,” Kara interrupted, and her voice was flat. There was no intonation in it, it was that sort of deadpan that Addy tended to revert back into when she wasn’t trying to keep her inflection relevant to her moods.

“And I want Carter’s father dead but you don’t see me _killing_ him, now do you?” Cat drawled, reaching for the whiskey again and taking a rather reckless chug of the remaining liquid, her face twisting into a grimace. “You and I are adults, Max, we’ve been around for longer than almost everyone else here. Start acting like it, sometimes you don’t _get_ what you want.”

Addy tilted her head, stared at Maxwell, at the way he was clutching his marker. “Do you want me to ensure he can’t fire off the bomb?” She asked, not hiding the intent behind it.

Maxwell flicked his gaze towards her, looking harried.

“Addy...” Kara warned.

“I will not hurt him, but I can stop him if necessary.” It wasn’t like his ion blocker was stopping _her_ from interfering with his brain. Not that something as rudimentary as that would on a good day, in any event.

“You won’t even take my idea into consideration?” Maxwell tried, again, sounding weary.

“Your idea involves the deaths of three hundred thousand,” Lucy started.

Maxwell cut his hand through the air in a sharp gesture, face twisted up in frustration. “To save billions!”

“No,” Lucy refuted, voice calm, completely level, but not even remotely sympathetic. “To ensure that Kryptonians can’t return to National City.”

Addy watched, almost rapt, as the rest of the occupants of the area began to approach. Alex, from behind her, was touching her gun holster with one hand, ready to draw as she stepped forward. Kara’s arms were slightly slanted away from her body, ready to grapple, to grab, whereas Winn was on his feet, skittish, but with an eye towards the only exit. James, meanwhile, was very pointedly gripping the top of a chair a few paces away from Maxwell.

Cat, not needing a conventional weapon to be intimidating, simply stared at the man with lidded eyes, a glass held in her hand.

Addy took another step forward.

“Alright,” Maxwell said, the marker dropping from his hand. His voice was resigned, tired, and bitter. As it should be, Addy couldn’t help but think. “Fine. Let’s do it your way.”

* * *

The space felt even more empty than before. They’d managed to get the remaining few out of the building, leaving only them, and then had gone around packing things up. If this was to work, it needed to be quick, efficient, no bumbling. Winn was still typing away on his computer, working from what information she’d fed him about infrastructure and core dynamics, whereas Maxwell remained a few paces away, arms stubbornly crossed over his chest, fingers white-knuckled in the fabric of his own suit jacket.

Addy herself was perched on the desk, letting her legs rise and fall in an unsteady, asynchronous swing, if only to occupy herself. Lucy was not far away, picking at some food she’d found in the staff mini-fridge, and James had his head down, clearly trying not to think, sitting in one of the occupied desks, hands occasionally trying to grip at hair he didn’t have near his nape.

Alex and Kara shared a lingering hug near the open window, tight and personal and intimate in that family-to-family sort of way. It was odd, but Addy didn’t feel like she was intruding by watching it, not like she did when she observed Taylor and Annette’s own hugs and shared private moments. At the same time, she felt like she should, which was all-around very uncomfortable, and she wanted her brain to stop contradicting itself with such frequency.

Alex pulled away from Kara with a huff, patting her on both shoulders. “Alright,” she murmured. “If things go wrong, you _leave_ , okay Kara?”

Kara set her jaw and said nothing.

“ _Kara_ ,” Alex tried again, her fingers tensing.

“You have me on the earpiece,” Kara said gently, reaching up to pry her sister’s fingers from her shoulders. “You’ll be there to guide me through it. I will be fine.”

“Promise me?” Alex said, a surprising moment of weakness.

Kara shook her head, smiled sadly, and stepped back. Another step and she was at the window, reaching behind her with one hand to push it open.

Alex’s hands turned to fists at her sides, fingers twitching, but she said nothing.

Kara turned, eased one foot onto the ledge, and then pushed off and out, twisting into a blur of red, blue and gold. Addy watched her go, her figure vanishing quickly out of sight as she turned on an arc, slipping around the side of the building at speeds that made the glass rattle.

Alex reached up shakily, tapping her earpiece. “Can you hear me, Kara?”

For a moment, she was still, before a soft smile spread across her face. “Good. Contact me when you arrive at the building, alright?” Her hand fell away again after that, dropping to her side, not clenching back into the tight knot of digits and white knuckles, but still clenching back and forth, never fully closing, but never quite remaining still.

Addy could relate.

She pushed her legs to swing a bit harder, glanced towards the sun, which had finally started its arc back down towards the horizon. It wasn’t quite there yet, but it was at least past one or two o’clock in the afternoon at this point.

Out of the corner of her eye, Addy spotted Lucy ambling to her feet and making her way over to Alex. She slung one arm around her shoulders with casual ease, leaning in to murmur something that made Alex relax, her fingers finally ceasing their persistent clench-and-unclench. Alex said something in return, but Addy didn’t even attempt to listen in, glancing towards Winn.

He was looking back up at her, his screen working through the compiling process. “Hey Addy,” he said softly, almost like he was afraid to wake someone up.

Addy eased her face into one of the smiles she had been practicing, just for him. He was one of the most important people in her life, despite all of his foibles. Number three was certainly a rather high ranking, after all. “Winn.”

“Did you uh, tell me _all_ you knew about Coluan architecture?” He asked curiously.

Addy shook her head. “The amount of information on them is substantial. They have ancestral memory logs that compile the tiers of changes done to their people generation-by-generation. I fed you the adequate resources to create what you intend to, but any more and it would be distracting.”

Winn’s face fell for a moment, before perking back up. “Wait does that mean you’ll teach—”

There was a flash of red. Addy reacted on instinct, reaching out to grab Winn, haul him down.

The windows shattered, an explosion of force as a red laser gouged its way above them, shearing through the frames of windows, the walls, liquid glass and metal bubbling and openly burning as it fell like raindrops from the cut the laser carved into the side of the building.

“No, Kara!” Alex’s voice said from somewhere behind her. “We have Addy here—we’ll be fine. Get the thing! No, Kara, we can deal with this—”

Her attention jumped towards Maxwell, on the ground, clutching his shoulder where a small bit of flesh had been at once carved out and instantly cauterized. No risk of bleeding out, at least.

The rest of those around her she reached out to her power to find out about. She didn’t access their memories, only the part of her power she’d delegated to Taylor which would inform her of her subject’s health. Alex had gotten some slight burns from proximity to the laser, but had ducked. James was covered in small incisions from the shattering glass, but was otherwise fine. Lucy, much the same, having been hit by similar shrapnel from glass exploding due to sudden temperature differentials. Winn had some bruising where his legs had hit the ground, but nothing more.

Another scan found Cat, who was on the ground. She hadn’t been so lucky, a portion of her right bicep gouged out by the laser, deep enough that unlike Maxwell, it would require immediate medical care to ensure it didn’t get any worse. The cauterizing effect of the laser was likely the only thing that would save both the woman herself and the arm. None of this was even bringing up the litany of small gouges across her skin, being so close to the window, though thankfully she had been looking away and had not lost the use of her eyes.

“Alex,” Addy said, processing. “Help Miss Grant. She’s the only one who needs aid.”

A figure outside of the building caught her attention, shadowed by the sun behind her. She floated forward, short white hair cropped into something resembling a pixie cut, with bright green eyes and pale skin. She wore a similar suit to what Astra had, albeit one with the sleeves removed, revealing her scar-covered, corded muscular arms.

She floated in through the opening she had made for herself, her flight slowing down until her feet crunched against the glass on the ground.

Addy eased herself off of the table.

“I am Karsta Wor-Ul,” the Kryptonian announced, voice firm, unrelenting. A soldier’s cadence. “I have been tasked with killing all of you.”

“Why?” Winn said below her in a whisper.

It had likely been a rhetorical question, but Karsta directed her gaze towards him anyway. Super senses and x-ray vision, Addy remembered. “Because Non has dictated that since the scion of House El took his family, he would take hers. We found you by tracking her flight as she handled the fires, and when she left, you were to be executed.”

Karsta’s eyes tracked over to her as she took another step forward.

Addy ran through her memories of her fight with Kara, however full of holes from the damage sustained to her brain. Fighting Kara had been more focused on _surviving_ Kara, but this couldn’t be the same here. A similar tactic might work—drawing the woman’s attention, but she could not leave without giving everyone but Cat and Maxwell over to Myriad. She would need to keep her attention, keep her attacking her, all without forcing Karsta to resort to the far easier method of executing everyone by sweeping over the crowd with her lasers again.

Flashes of Kara’s eyes, burning red—the fear of death.

Addy suppressed it.

She took another step forward.

“While we will not send any of you to see Rao,” Karsta continued after a delay, eyes now solely focused on Addy, on the steps she was taking towards her. “I will at least ensure you are properly turned to ash, if only to ensure you are not buried like others are on this antiquated backwater.”

She couldn’t switch to control in this case, either. She needed to keep her range wide enough to ensure everyone was blocked from Myriad. She was restricted, the crippling done to her coming back to bite her, again. She couldn’t create a second instance of her powers, it was one-setting only, she didn’t have the tools to do so.

She felt Winn behind her, his tremulous fear vibrating out from her vague awareness of his position.

She heightened that awareness, letting the energy in her body burn away a little faster, hooked herself into the senses of everyone under her influence. James, Lucy, Winn, Alex; she even branched out, smoothed her presence over Cat and Maxwell, took their senses for her own.

Her multi-tasking spread wider, she felt her chest tighten. Karsta, as tall as she was, more muscular than she was by no insignificant amount, and considerably more capable of mass destruction, watched her with cool, calm eyes.

Addy watched her back with fourteen.

“May you find peace with Rao,” Karsta said, almost too quiet to hear, before blurring forward.

The world slowed, Addy turned her head to the side, lowered herself, and Karsta’s fist missed her head, likely intending to crush it, by inches. The sheer force of the blow sent the table behind her toppling over with a clatter, seen through other eyes.

Addy jolted forward, driving her forehead into Karsta’s nose, sending her tumbling back. Not letting her, she lashed out, caught her arm in the vice grip of her fingers, used Winn’s gaze to position herself as she twisted, spun, and brought Karsta’s body, heavy and durable, up and over her head before whipping it into the ground.

The floor shattered beneath the impact, and so did the four floors beneath it.

Addy eased herself into the air, avoiding the widening hole she’d left in the floor and centring herself back around the others. “Get as close to me as possible,” she said, using multiple ears to amplify her own. The creak of drywall, the crunch of glass, and then the thunderous bang of something moving at impossibly fast speeds.

James narrowly missed Karsta pulping him, scrambling forward on his hands and knees as the Kryptonian erupted out from the ground, spraying debris in every direction.

A few eyes closed to avoid the spray.

Addy adjusted.

Karsta’s eyes glowed, going from green to red in an instant. Addy didn’t let her, couldn’t, jarred herself forward into the highest speed she could manage without causing a blastwave, reaching out with her hand. Karsta tried to dodge, but the multiple perspectives let her adjust to that too, catching her face in her outstretched hand just as the lasers finally erupted.

Pain. It hurt, almost as much as the red kryptonite dispersal agent. Twin beams of plasma gouged into her skin, carved past her durability, but not before the reflected energy, so concentrated, was pressed back into Karsta’s eyes.

The Kryptonian screamed, jerking away and through the glass behind her with a loud shatter, hands coming up to clutch at her face where the skin had blackened around her eyes.

Addy let her hand drop to her side, blood freely flowing from it even as the enhanced regenerative properties of her biology rushed to repair it. Two quarter-sized holes, down to the bone, freely spread blood. She checked her own vitals with a twitch back to her coreself; it was in bad repair, but it was nothing her natural healing could not account for, if her estimates were right. It was however a risk, due to the high amounts of blood loss, but she could cope with that as things came. She would just not have to sustain similar damage.

Flexing her fingers, she suppressed the spike of pain. Her pinky was inoperable due to muscle damage, the rest were fine. She could deal with that.

Karsta’s hands finally fell from her face, revealing blackened eyes, pupilless and unseeing. Good. She said nothing, but everything about how she floated in the air, hands tight at her sides, radiated anger, rage. That was good too. She could work with rage, rage was the best way to get someone killed, to eliminate targets. People forget about their limits when angry.

Her eyes briefly glowed red again before she let out another cry of pain, the light dimming and then sparking out, one hand coming up to paw at her left eye. Her head, nevertheless, turned to her, likely finding her through those enhanced senses—the beat of her heart, the sound of blood dripping onto the floor, the steady rise and fall of her breath.

“ _I’ve got it!_ ” Kara’s voice said through Alex’s ears, felt her body light up with elation, chemicals swirling. “ _I’m on my way back!_ ”

That was good too.

But not good enough.

Karsta launched forward again, this time with significantly less grace. She kept her arms wide, her legs too, and simply drove herself through the environment, a wild flailing that carved through the ceiling, the walls, materials giving way to an invulnerable, impossibly powerful body.

A piece of ceiling slammed down just next to Cat, causing her to shriek. Karsta’s head snapped around, her entire body pivoting in the air.

Addy flashed into the air, meeting her launch towards Cat mid-way. She brought her arm up, caught one of Karsta’s sloppy swings on the arc down, the blow hard enough to ache, sending her down into the ground, her feet shattering through the floor like cardboard. Karsta’s own trajectory adjusted with it, turning down onto her, both hands lashing out with uncanny accuracy, catching her head between each palm and _pressing_.

“ _Chai rrip_ ,” Karsta snarled into her face, the melodic language spilling from her lips at odds with her actions, pressing in harder. Addy reached up, grappled with her wrists, ignored the black spots flashing around her eyes, the unpleasant feeling of her bone beginning to actively _give_ beneath the pressure, the feeling of hairline fractures settling into place across the surface of her skull. “ _Dhehriv!_ ”

Addy dropped the plan to pry her off. She was too strong, too anchored, she needed to reverse that. Ignoring the widening fractures, the pressure in her skull, every last ounce of pain that she simply suppressed, Addy whipped around, drawing her legs free from the ground in a spray of shrapnel, pushing out with her flight and into the air, throwing both of them into a spin. The pressure on her head abated enough that her powers could begin to kick in, the hairline fractures easing shut, the pressure relenting, and she applied more momentum, more force, to throw them into an increasingly fast spin.

With Cat’s eyes, she timed it just right. Karsta hit the ceiling before she did, and the built-up speed from the endeavour made her lose her grip on her head, her body cascading through it, up into the floor above. A large portion of the ceiling buckled, gave way with a tremendous creak, falling towards the ground, and it was only Addy rushing forward, catching it before its weight could crater into the ground like a meteor, that prevented a total structural collapse.

Easing the piece of ceiling down, covered in what looked to be filing cabinets, Addy slunk out from beneath, staring towards where Karsta was. She was still floating, looking disoriented in the air, not a few feet outside.

Everything started to shake; the walls trembled, Addy could even pick up on the sound of distant shattering glass.

Karsta turned just in time to catch a smear of blue directly in the torso, Kara barreling into her at supersonic speeds. What glass hadn’t yet exploded did, monitors and windows and Cat’s precious glass office all shattered like an over-pressurized bottle. Addy flew forward, keeping everyone in her range, but getting just enough of a vantage point to watch Kara and Karsta hit the street with a tremendous _bang_ , dust and debris thrown high into the air and the ground itself giving an unsteady quake, metal creaking in her ears.

The dust cleared, and Kara, down below, held Karsta’s limp form with one hand tight around her suit. She glanced back their way, _Addy’s_ way, she was quick to remind herself, and then rose higher and higher into the air, speeding up. She stopped well above CatCo tower, then shot off towards the distant horizon, Karsta’s limp body flailing behind her.

Addy lowered herself down, her feet touching the ground. The world swam for a moment, not bad enough that she needed to sit, but before she could rectify that, her legs promptly gave out on her, dropping her on her rear.

She weakened the connection between herself and the others, became an individual again with two eyes and one arm, as was normal.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Maxwell said from somewhere behind her.

* * *

“...and that should do it,” Winn said, after another moment, his eyes trained on the cube in his hand, connected up to his computer via the USB port, begin to pull itself apart into red particulate. It spasmed for a moment in the air, then surged forward, vanishing into the computer itself.

Addy tried to feel for Myriad’s disappearance, but couldn’t sense any differences, though Alex’s continued prodding at the places where her scalp had fractured under the physical strain was distracting her. She still had her pain suppressed, despite everything, not entirely prepared for the pain that would follow when she reopened the sensory link.

“How long should it take?” James asked, wobbling a bit, Lucy helping him remain upright. He’d taken more damage over the course of the fight, some minor concussive damage to his left knee as a result of the table that Karsta had sent flying with that punch. Lucy had managed to get off almost entirely unscathed, by contrast.

“Not too long,” Maxwell said, voice distant, quiet. “A minute, two? I don’t know, it depends on how quickly the injection process takes.”

“Stop fidgeting, Addy,” Alex muttered, brushing her hair down for the fifth time in as many seconds and wrapping another length of bandage around her head.

Addy blinked down at her legs which were, to Alex’s credit, swinging a bit.

“Okay,” she tried, because she was feeling very odd. Tired, but not. She knew the source of this state was the adrenaline, and that she would soon crash as a result of her body cutting off access to it, but still, it was very, very odd.

Glancing back up, Addy watched Kara ease more of the crumpled ceiling back into place with a grunt. Not that it was fixed or anything, but rather she was just removing it from the unstable floor they were all on. They should probably leave soon, now that she thought about it.

Kara landed after another few moments of fiddling with the placement, clapping her hands together to clear them of some of the drywall dust, coughing awkwardly as it came back up to cloud around her face.

“What did you do with the Kryptonian, anyway?” Maxwell asked, still sounding distant. Ah, no, she’d figured it out, he was dissociating. Right. Humans could do that.

Kara glanced his way, something like sheepishness crawling over her face. “I threw her into the ocean.”

Alex sighed, out of sight, a belaboured, tired sort of sigh. “We could have captured her,” she pointed out tartly.

“I don’t want the D.E.O. anywhere near another Kryptonian,” Kara explained tightly. “Not after what they did to Astra in captivity—that and I didn’t think we had any Kryptonite cuffs to hold her.”

She felt it, finally. The receding pressure against the others, that psychic weight beginning to pull back slowly, intricately. A few seconds later, and it was gone.

Addy, relieved, dropped her blocking.

Alex kept bandaging her head, Winn kept fidgeting with his hands, Lucy and James kept muttering to one-another and laughing.

They were safe.

“Myriad’s gone,” she blurted, not able to stop herself.

““Oh thank god,”” Winn and Kara said in sync.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I managed to get this out between taking care of Mom.
> 
> Anyway, translations:
> 
> Chai rrip | 'Kill you'.  
> Dhehriv! | 'Die!'.
> 
> I'm not fluent in the conlang version of Kryptonese, so... it's probably not grammatically accurate, but I did my best?


	21. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara and Addy go grocery shopping.

“ _Now, after two days, it would seem that the CatCo building has finally started its lengthy repair project,_ ” Coraline May, one of the more popular newscasters - as far as Addy could tell, anyway - remarked, a small window appearing next to her head, showing a short clip of a team of workers beginning to set scaffolding up around the place where Karsta had gouged a chunk out of the building. “ _Despite early reviews painting a bleak image of the building’s stability, some even going so far as to say it may need to be torn down, the city council and a small board of architectural experts agreed to allow for repairs to go forward, with some caveats._ ”

The clip next to her head changed, revealing a balding man in his late thirties, a bit pudgy around the chin, with a perpetual sheen of red cast across doughy cheekbones. “ _We believe the building will need a few adjustments to compensate for the damage done to it_ ,” the man said in a surprisingly deep voice, easily baritone. Addy had expected something high, almost nasally, but then perhaps she had been taking too much of Cat Grant’s errant commentary to heart lately. “ _That is simply how things are—when materials are damaged in big construction projects such as these, you must not only replace them, but replace what the damage has influenced. However, outside of that, we do believe the building is salvageable, given the proper steps._ ”

Addy rocked her leg back and forth from its place flung over the back of the couch. Her other leg was splayed straight out, knee leaning off the couch far enough to rest against the hard wooden surface of the coffee table. Truthfully, she wasn’t particularly sure why she chose this position to lay in—nothing about it was believably helpful, but it was very, very comfortable.

“ _The damage done to the CatCo building has put an estimated nine-hundred people out of work for the time being_ ,” Coraline continued, the window blinking away. She was a very _colourful_ woman, with long, curly ginger ringlets, a face full of delightful freckles, and eyes a startling green. She wasn’t conventional for what Addy had come to understand was a female newscaster; most of them were blonde and without blemishes, but then Coraline had apparently gotten her start as a storm chaser and gained a cultish following, so the network had folded and made her a newscaster after an accident made any further storm chasing implausible. “ _Though Cat Grant herself has stated those directly hired by CatCo Worldwide Media will be collecting their wages and doing their jobs, largely from home, that still leaves nearly six-hundred and fifty people out of work who had offices in the building but did not necessarily work for the company_. _She made this announcement on the back of her decision to apparently decline the President's request that she become her Press Secretary, citing a need to 'clean up the mess that was left after all that rot'._ ”

People had been very busy. Kara was seldom home—National City was a community of four million and there was an untold amount of damage. When Myriad had kicked into effect, there had apparently been about four seconds where people were under its influence, but not its control, which meant they did nothing. Ninety-four people had died from automobile-related accidents, a passenger plane flying over National City at the time had been forced to ground itself at a nearby airport after nearly crashing.

There were other things, too. Despite there not being a huge fight in the streets, there had been a lot of panic immediately after Myriad had been released. People, in foreign places, having just felt what it was like to not be in control of their own bodies, lashed out wildly. Fights had been a constant, people were dealing with unexpected trauma as people always did: poorly. None of this was bringing up how the fire that had swept through the downtown part of the city had taken nearly a dozen apartments with it, which was leaving an estimated thousand people without shelter.

As a result, Kara spent almost basically every waking moment as Supergirl. It wasn’t like she had much in the way of commitments, Addy could admit, Cat Grant had more or less told Kara her job as an assistant was to be put on hold for the time being, at least until the chaos in the streets died down.

Alex was busy too. The D.E.O. had all hands on deck, she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Kara’s sister after they parted ways, despite Alex promising to come and check up on Kara. She had, of course, Addy had overheard their phone call, but she was clearly just as swamped.

Winn was equally as busy, though for different and less obfuscated reasons. He was more or less running the CatCo website at this point, full hands-on-deck, and was holed up in the building they’d moved the servers to. He was doing a good job at it, but any attempt to initiate a conversation with him always got a ‘not right now, busy’ back in response. Which she believed, yes, but it was still rather disheartening.

Carol was the only one she had managed to have a moderate-length conversation with, and that had been mostly an afterthought. Carol had called the day after she had been brought home - and not to the Fortress, as neither Clark nor Kara could spare the time and it wasn’t completely likely that she could lift the key to the Fortress with only one arm - by Kara and told to sunbathe until the wounds on her hand and head healed. Supposedly, aliens were fearing retaliation from the paranoid masses and had decided to lay low until the Myriad incident blew over, so the bar wasn’t going to be open.

That and to ‘keep herself safe’, as though she might be threatened by a human who didn’t like her for her genetic makeup.

When she had relayed as much to Carol, the woman had claimed that humans had a bad habit of ‘finding a way’ when it came to being dangerous, and Addy had conceded the point, or at least somewhat.

Unfortunately, that left her with birdwatching, television watching, and the internet as plausible ways to pass the time. Even more unfortunately, the current hour and the next two into the future constituted what she was classifying as a ‘dead zone’ for cartoons, in that the majority of them weren’t appealing to her for a multitude of reasons. She had yet to broach Kara on what constituted as a drama show in this universe—Taylor had a fondness for Degrassi and she had been curious to see if it existed here as well, and that was unlikely to change until the city itself was mostly fixed, and by that point she would already have some sort of task to keep herself occupied.

Which left her with the news. Dreaded boring, with no interest in making fascinating noises, but at least it was an adequate way to acquire information on the ongoing problems in the city.

“ _CatCo is not the only place handling repairs right now,_ ” Caroline said, another window popping up next to her, showing some unlit streets with popping powerlines. “ _A large-scale undertaking to fix the city’s power grid is already underway, and it is estimated that the downtown part of the city will regain power over the next four or five hours. Downtown National City remains the only place with consistent black-outs. The source is believed to be a mixture of things; among which was a fatal car crash that caused damage to some essential wiring._ ”

Most of the national news was focused on National City, for better or for worse, though she couldn’t be so sure about Fox. Apparently, at some point, Kara had simply banned the channel and Addy was grudgingly willing to say the security for the cable box, as achieved through making navigating the menus as labyrinthine as possible and without much consistency, had been adequate enough to discourage her from finding a way to fix that. Purposefully redundant design coupled with intentionally complicated systems had always been a fond favourite of hers for security measures, not that she enjoyed it much when she was on the receiving end.

Nevertheless, she’d eventually decided on Caroline May because she was the most interesting, bright, and pleasant one out of the options available. The other women were all blonde and pale, and the men were all old and had thin, wispy hair that looked unpleasant for reasons Addy had yet to ascertain. At the very least, Caroline May had some heterogeneity when it came to her freckles and delightfully curly hair.

“ _On a more positive note, however, Maxwell Lord has just committed to a live interview and we’re on-site as we speak. Do we have cameras on it?_ ”

Addy felt her stomach twist, and she instinctively reached for the remote, only for her arm to get caught on the sling it was tucked away in. That was the other reason why she had so little to do: because they couldn’t get her access to a sunbed, as Clark was busy dealing with all the things he missed in Metropolis, and Kara dealing with the Myriad fallout, she was still healing. Quickly, yes, she would be operable in, by her own estimate, a little under sixteen hours, but Kara had made her promise to keep her arm until it was _fully_ healed. Which was difficult, because Karsta’s decision to fire her lasers resulted in plasma gouging holes out of her hand and directly hitting her bone for a short period, the rapid expansion of heat causing a large variety of micro-fractures down her only operable arm that she had only noticed after the fact. It was mostly healed now, but Kara had made her promise, and she wasn’t about to break her confidence.

Still, she would rather not watch Maxwell, and Kara _had_ taped the remote to the table for exactly this reason, so she could poke it with her elbow or the few fingers she could extend out past the sling.

Leaning forward, Addy had perhaps half a second to realize the unbalancing of her weight was pushing the couch back and opening a gap between it and the coffee table before her knee slipped free, the hard edge of the table pressed against a bundle of nerves at the top of her knee, and in response, her leg lashed out with utmost precision, slammed into the remote, and sent it hurtling into the wall, where it promptly shattered into a few hundred pieces, leaving behind blackish scuffs on the wall.

Addy stared, blinked slowly.

Was this what Kara was talking about, when referencing accidentally using her strength? Addy could relate. That was very embarrassing, and very frustrating, because Kara wasn’t likely to be impressed. Remotes were apparently expensive, and she had just broken one across the wall like an egg.

“ _So, Maxwell_ ,” a new voice interrupted, and Addy, begrudgingly, turned her head to look. On the television, instead of there being Coraline May, Maxwell Lord and a blonde woman, almost identical to every other blonde woman newscaster, sat facing one another. They were on some sort of stage, with red curtains covering the walls behind them, and between them was a small table. “ _You haven’t been seen since you were spotted coming out of the CatCo building not long after the mind control fell. What’s kept you?_ ”

Fear, in Addy’s opinion.

“ _Well,_ Jessica _,_ ” the way Maxwell emphasized the name, made it roll off of his lips, turned Addy’s stomach. Why did he have to be like that? He could speak perfectly normally, she had seen it, what was the purpose of that sort of behaviour? “ _What I witnessed, it made me rethink a lot of things, I had to._ ”

“ _Such as?_ ” Jessica probed, leaning forward.

Maxwell’s face, on closer inspection, was drawn, wan. He had bruises under each eye, his fingers stuttered nervously on the arm of the chair, he looked like he hadn’t slept yet. “ _That the way I’ve been approaching things, it wasn’t the right way_ ,” he said tiredly, almost solemnly.

“ _You’ve always been a vocal critic of Supergirl,_ ” Jessica rushed to comment, smiling broadly. Almost predatory, now that she looked closer at it. “ _Has that changed?_ ”

“ _No, I believe Kryptonians need critics—they need dissent, to ensure their actions don’t get lost in the media, but..._ ” He trailed off, reaching up to scratch at his chin. “ _I’ll be blunt, since I’ve learned it's easier: LordTech will be following Lena Luthor’s example and moving away from weapons manufacturing, and back to the company’s roots, focusing on robotics and software engineering, as well as some medical technology and material sciences._ ”

Addy watched as Jessica’s jaw all but dropped. It was oddly humanizing for the woman, who looked nearly indistinguishable from every other newscaster. It made her seem less like a prop, more like a person.

“ _I would have thought your experiences would have driven you in the opposite direction_ ,” Jessica replied slowly, each word visibly being considered. “ _Considering how violent it was._ ”

“ _Let me ask you something Jessica, do you remember the cold war?_ ” Maxwell asked bluntly, voice almost deadpan.

Jessica’s smile strained. “ _Are you fishing for my age, Mr. Lord?_ ”

“ _Just answer the question_.”

Jessica’s throat bobbed, and finally, she shrugged. “ _Sort of. I don’t remember much of it, but I was born in the 80s._ ”

“ _Right well, we don’t like talking about it, it’s not our greatest moment, but during the 80s people thought they were going to die._ ” Maxwell shifted in his seat, brought his hands into his lap. “ _That one day the nukes would fall. It felt inevitable, it was the future doomsday that nobody could prepare for. We did a lot of awful things as a result, reckless things, drugs, unprotected sex, the thought always was you’d never have to deal with the problems because by then the planet would be a charred wasteland_.

“ _I’m not sure_ —” Jessica tried.

“ _Weapons, Jessica, are a deterrent. I will concede that much, but the existence of weapons is to encourage your enemies to match you. The ‘big stick’ philosophy only works when your enemies cannot, within reason, match up to you. See, nukes don’t discriminate—neither did mutually assured destruction. The bomb falls, we all die. There aren’t nukes for black people, white people, Jewish people, communists, capitalists, monarchists—there just aren’t_.

“ _But imagine,_ Jessica _, for a moment, that humans were deathly allergic to... say, platinum. Both touch and proximity, if you get near to platinum it makes you weak, hysterical, it causes pain. If you touch platinum, it’s even worse. Veins of platinum on our world would be feared, quarantined, because they’re a hazard._ ”

Jessica simply nodded, clearly taken in and engrossed.

“ _Every time someone made a weapon with platinum, we would see it as a weapon to kill us. Nukes were bad enough, but they didn’t discriminate; you armed them, and they were a unilateral threat. There was no sense that you were making nukes because you wanted to wipe away a specific type of person, because in the end nukes do not care who their fireball kills. But platinum? It might only kill us, and a weapon which utilized it would, therefore, be seen as a weapon with the sole purpose of killing us. It would always be a threat, and what we saw in the cold war - nuclear proliferation, developments in weapons like that - well, it would be worse, because now the threat was only to us, now every example of it would be only to kill us, and we would have to make a weapon to at least match._ ”

“ _Did you?_ ” Jessica asked, blinking a few times before shaking her head, working herself out of a haze. “ _Make a weapon, I mean._ ”

“ _I tried,_ ” Maxwell said blandly. “ _But it was taken from me before it could become one. They repurposed it, made it something better, by my own estimate. Something that can help_.”

Something about this was feeling very personal.

“ _Over the recent incident, the reality of where I was going with my tech, with my actions—it became clear. I still think we should have checks and balances, I still think we should protect ourselves if possible, but considering how things are going with President Marsdin and the Alien Amnesty Act, I think I was taking it too far. It’s one thing to make technology to protect ourselves with, it’s another thing to be making technology with the unilateral intent to wipe something out because there’s the possibility it can become a threat in the future_.”

Maxwell rose from his chair in one fluid motion, turning to the camera. “ _I’m sorry_.”

Then he left, ignoring the rabid follow-up questions yelled at him.

* * *

Kara’s return, as it had been for the last several days, was graceless. It was hard watching Kara’s wobbly flight as she floated in through the window, costume smudged with soot and dirt and looking utterly exhausted.

Still, Addy kept it off her face, because she didn’t want to add to it any.

“Hi Addy,” Kara mumbled, boots finally touching ground, a wobbly step bringing her forward until her head could rest against the wall.

“Hi, Kara,” Addy returned, because it was polite. She was still on the couch, still splayed out as she was, and the television was still on the news. She’d gone looking for another remote but had only come up with the television’s remote, not another cable remote, and had resorted to muting it and watching youtube videos on her laptop. She was currently working through a series of recorded lectures on avian evolution during the later years of the Jurassic.

“You eat everything today?” Kara queried, voice muffled by the wall.

Addy, distracted by another diagram, made an affirmative noise. She had found the secret to eating yogurt: _granola_ , and raisins. After she’d added some texture she’d been able to go through her required nutritional intake with little issue. She’d also cleared off several glasses of water by first crushing ice and adding it, after coming to the revelation with granola. The ice gave everything a texture that didn’t make her stomach turn, all good things.

“Anything interesting happen?” Kara asked, face still pressed into the wall like she was talking to it and not Addy.

Addy flicked her eyes back to the television screen, to the sight of LordTech stocks plummeting down to a new low, but with a ‘tentative stability’ if the analyst was to be believed. Personally, Addy knew that the markets were all mostly fake and controlled by autonomous programs; market sway was arbitrary and inherently unstable as a result. “Maxwell Lord denounced his previous actions and has committed to not continuing weapons manufacturing.”

There was a loud, sharp _crunch_.

Addy flicked her head towards Kara, catching sight of her retrieving her forehead from the small dent she’d made in the wall.

Kara stared mournfully at the damage, bringing her hands up to her face, covering it in its entirety. “I _just_ got the door repaired,” she groaned. “I can’t even be happy about that because now I have to go and explain why there’s a forehead-shaped dent in my wall!”

Her hands came down after another moment, a breathy huff bursting out of Kara’s chest. She turned, likely intending to be towards her room, only to halt on the muted television. “Addy?”

She had been hoping to put that off. “Yes?”

“Why’s it on the news? I mean, if you’re interested in that, it’s okay, but I’m pretty sure one of your favourite shows is on right now and you’re pretty... intense about schedules.”

She was, she could agree on that much. She had watched her favourite cartoon on her laptop already, pre-empting this issue, so she only felt marginally upset she was missing it. Torrents were a wondrous and interesting data distribution method. Shaking the thoughts away, Addy steadied her gaze on her leg, to the coffee table she’d dragged back in after she cleaned up the plastic mess she’d reduced the remote to. “Are you aware that humans have a cluster of nerves on the top of their knee?”

“...I have that too, Addy. It’s a tendon and nerve cluster.”

“Oh.” She would keep that in mind. “Nevertheless, I attempted to utilize the remote after seeing Maxwell Lord on the television, as I do not like him and seeing his face is frustrating. My weight unbalanced, it moved the chair away, that bundle of nerves came into contact with the hard edge of the table and my body, involuntarily, may have kicked the remote into the wall.”

Kara made another noise, a weak keening sort of sound. Her hands returned to her face for a moment as she clearly tried to process this new revelation. “...Did you at least clean it up?”

“Of course I did,” Addy cut back, affronted. It would be unimaginably impolite not to do that much; she had not just broken the remote, but she had also reduced the battery inside of the note into an acidic puddle.

Kara glanced at her from between her fingers, a shaky smile flicking over her features. “Sorry, Ads,” Kara mumbled, using that nickname that she didn’t always but Addy always liked. It made her chest feel warm, she even squirmed her legs a little because the energy had to go _somewhere_ and she was going to float if she did nothing with it. “Rough day for me, and all that. I’m glad you cleaned it up, we can get another remote tomorrow, it’s not a big deal.”

Addy felt the pressure on her chest let up, letting out a little breath. Her need to wiggle ended with it, legs coming to a rest again. “Okay. I’ll be healed by that time, so I can come too.”

Kara, still in costume, tottered over to the kitchen, tugging the fridge open, lips pursing. “We need groceries too,” she said absently, finally reaching forward to pull some of the takeout leftovers out. It said something that Kara had been _too busy_ for potstickers and fried rice. “More milk, gotta order yogurt too— _uurgh_ , I am so glad Miss Grant is still paying me. Expenses have been unfortunately high lately.”

Addy turned her eyes away, content to listen to Kara rummage around in the paper bag, retrieving squeaky styrofoam bundles and plod over to the microwave, which opened with a loud, electronic chime. A few beeps later, the thing turned on with a whirr.

Not long after, Kara passed by the couch and made a line for her room.

Addy felt the pressure on her chest release, just that little bit more.

* * *

Kara was a morning person. Addy knew what that meant in the abstract, of course, using Taylor’s memories as a reference point she divined the meaning of the term, muttered darkly by Alex on that drive back from the D.E.O. base. It felt like ages since that had happened, oddly, her reference frame for time had always been scarily accurate, and yet it truly felt like it had been... years since she’d first woken up.

The point being, Kara was a morning person. Addy had come to accept this much out of her, even despite Addy herself preferring to remain asleep when the opportunity was given. Kara’s quiet clattering as she worked through the kitchen to prepare breakfast had always been a nice thing to listen to as she dozed, just the idea that she wasn’t alone was soothing.

This, though? This went too far.

“Sorry about how dusty the car is,” Kara said brightly, with too much cheer. She was fiddling with her rearview mirror with one hand, and with the other easing the car into gear. “I haven’t taken it out since, well, I became Supergirl, but I kinda don’t want to be caught flying with bags of groceries.”

Addy obstinately didn’t respond, pressing her face into the slightly cool surface of the airbag housing, eyes shut. It was five o’clock in the morning. She had been awake for thirty minutes. She did not want to be awake. But she had to be, because Kara had explained that this was kinda the only time she had to herself for the time being and she really didn’t want to be interrupted when out shopping.

Addy was not even aware there _were_ stores open at five in the morning, but then she had been worryingly incorrect about a lot of things lately, including the fabric of reality, so she wasn’t really in a place to make predictions until she could properly restructure her databanks, something she had been putting off in large part due to having significantly bigger concerns.

The car lurched unsteadily forward at just the right speed to make Addy’s brain, inner ear canal, and all of the other arbitrary parts of the body that humans used to create nausea from twist unpleasantly.

“Really been a while,” Kara muttered, the car lurching again before finally, _finally_ smoothing out. “It’s all good! I relearn things quickly, and it’s only been—well, a couple of months.”

Addy was just glad they were both mostly invulnerable.

* * *

Early Bird Grocer was apparently named after the idiom _the early bird gets the worm_. The name was inspired by the fact that it opened at three in the morning and closed at five in the afternoon, and the fact that it sold everything at budget prices. Kara had sworn by it repeatedly on the way over, car prowling down largely-empty roads as they transitioned from the city center to the outer suburbs and smaller communities which were, technically, part of National City, but not really, but Addy couldn’t help but have her doubts.

Addy had been relegated, after some argument, to cart operation. Kara knew her way around the store - a complicated maze of interlocking shelves and overly-polite staff members that Addy tried her best to avoid like a plague because all of them _wanted to stare her in the eyes_ \- and Addy more or less just followed her, now-healed hand gripping the bar and shuttling the thing along as they went.

This was not to say that Kara didn’t include her. No, Kara was _too_ inclusive, if anything. Addy had yet to go grocery shopping with Kara before, and Kara clearly intended to make the best of the advantage with her here. While Addy could praise her for the initiative, she sincerely wished it just wasn’t directed at her.

Even saying that, however, Addy had obtained a surprising amount of information and they weren’t even done yet. She’d found out that she didn’t like blueberries due to the lack of uniformity among each of them, as she risked biting into a firm, juicy berry one time and next a sour, tart squishy one. Next, she found out that carrots came in bite-sized form, which she demanded several bags of and Kara had, obligingly, given her.

She had also learned about what Kara considered her secondary favourites. As it would turn out, Kara had a deep love for Oreo cookies and explained that she put aside money every week to buy them for herself so she could keep four or five of them on her throughout the day and reward herself when she thought she did something good. When Addy had asked if she did that when out as Supergirl, Kara had been suspiciously quiet.

“Ooh, pop-tarts are 40% off,” Kara’s words dragged her bodily from her recollections, and Addy obligingly adjusted her path to trail after Kara. Kara behaved not unlike a bloodhound when shopping, slipping her glasses down to scan the area with her ability to see through objects to hone in on a specific target before bursting off towards it, swerving through shelves and around corners at a pace Addy had to match.

If not for the fact that Kara was a very loud person when outside of her costume, stomping around, forever tripping, clumsy in ways that never ceased to amaze, Addy was certain she would’ve lost her by now.

Coming to a halt next to the frozen goods, Addy watched Kara pull one of the glass doors open, pouting when ‘3 PER PERSON’ stared back at her, taped just above the line-up of colourful, utterly unhealthy pop-tarts.

“Do you have a flavour you like?” Kara asked, glancing back her way.

Addy glanced towards the frozen vegetables. “I don’t like sweets.” Which was apparently very odd. There was something about most sweet things that was just too much. It was like biting into a frag grenade and her senses did not appreciate that. Sure, there were likely some sweets out there that she could palate without getting a headache, but she had yet to find them.

“That’s sad,” Kara said, but still shovelled three boxes of rainbow-sprinkle pop-tarts into the cart without hesitation. “Really sad.” She said, as though she was trying to make herself believe it.

Addy felt an urge and let it come, her eyes rolling up in what Taylor had mastered as _the_ unimpressed eye-roll.

Kara choked. “You rolled your eyes at me! Addy! That’s so rude!”

“No,” Addy said, beginning to push the cart forward, Kara trailing beside her. She ignored the way Kara’s eyes kept flicking towards the icecream section, passing it by even when Kara made one of those noises that meant she really wanted it. She would not give in if she didn’t look at Kara when she made those unhappy faces. “That is me stopping myself from commenting on your sugar intake.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t get cavities,” Kara announced proudly.

Addy did turn to look at her then, finally passing out of the temptatious frozen goods isles and into what looked to be a maze of magazine racks. “Your teeth are not what I am concerned about.” Could Kryptonians get diabetes? She’d have to look it up, but still, that amount of sugar was likely being burned as wasted energy. Take what you need was her philosophy about energy intake.

Kara’s cheeks puffed out comically, a pout on her lips. “Miss Grant’s a bad influence on you.”

Ah. She knew how to respond to _that_ one. “I’ll gladly inform her as much next time we go in,” she said, keeping her voice sage.

Kara’s resulting squawk was very funny, not that she let it show.

* * *

Kara ambled back into the car with an almost broken look on her face, a small box clutched in one hand.

Behind her, in the window of the local cable company’s retail shop, a brightly-smiling woman waved politely at them.

“I can’t believe a remote costs sixty bucks,” she said, shutting the door sluggishly. “I can’t believe I almost let them talk me into a new cable package that would’ve cost me forty more dollars per month for three years! I nearly signed it, Addy!”

Addy stared blankly. “You could just say no.”

Kara threw her head back against her seat. “But she was so nice!”

And? James could be nice, but she still felt the impulse to tell him ‘no’ plenty of times before. Even sometimes for things she was totally able to do but just didn’t want to because she knew it would frustrate him.

Maybe that much got across in her expression, because Kara just made more grumbling noises and eased the car back into motion, pulling out of the parking lot.

“One day, Addy,” Kara began, voice pitched into that voice she took on when she thought she was imparting grand wisdom. “You’ll understand the true terror of a determined, very polite retail worker.”

Addy wasn’t so sure about that.

* * *

“Alright!” Kara said, standing in her costume near the window. “Did we put everything away?”

Addy nodded.

“Even the frozen stuff?”

She nodded again.

“And you know my number to call if things go bad?”

Nod.

“Okay,” Kara breathed out, her power picking her up oh-so-gently, drawing her into the air. “Then I’m off, I’ll see you in like, twelve hours!”

Addy waved.

Kara smiled.

Then she was gone.

Ambling over to the couch, Addy plopped down onto its plush surface, pulled the new remote out from where they’d both unpackaged it on the coffee table, and flicked the television on again.

On the top right corner, in one of those graphic panels that the news so liked to use, 6:54AM stared back at her.

Addy changed the channel to cartoons, the early morning circuit just picking up, and let herself slump back into the cushions.

Maybe she should take a nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, total transparency here, I'm still taking care of my mom a lot and this is 100% filler and a breather between this and the climactic finale for this season, which will take place over the next 2 chapters. In fact, the next chapters is frankly really big but I intend to keep it as one, so expect that to make up for the short episode. I'm not sure if I'll totally be able to get it out on thursday, but this is mostly to just act as a buffer, give people the chance to breathe, and give me the chance to write something fluffy (I could really use it).
> 
> Anyhow, I hope you enjoy.


	22. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 20

Kara’s fingers smoothed over the surface of her forehead, tucking lone strands of her hair behind her ears. The touch was light, barely making sustained contact with her forehead, but left behind streaks of scented oil. What the scent was, well, Addy had no idea; there was no equivalent in Taylor’s memories, and until rather recently she had lacked olfactory senses herself. Kara had said it was the closest she could get to the actual ritual oil, made by synthesizing several existing chemicals together, though she promised it was safe to be in contact with her.

Addy wasn’t really sure what to feel about it. It smelled... _intense_ , the smell itself almost had a tactile feeling accompanying it, like how menthol could taste ‘cold’ in high enough concentrations. The smell itself was ‘hot’, for lack of a better term, and it made her skin feel too-warm, uncomfortably so, though she kept still. Kara had promised the anointment during the ritual was short, barely a few minutes, and that washing it off was actually part of the ritual itself.

Kara stepped away, head cant to one side in silence. The serious expression on her face was intense, and Addy felt herself shy instinctively away from it, flicking eyes from her face down to the floral-print pyjamas she was wearing. Wordlessly, Kara reached forward again, dragging her thumb over one of her cheekbones, cutting off a downward drip of oil before it could muddy the rest of the invisible pattern she had scrawled across her face.

Rather, invisible to _her_. Kara had explained in great detail the significance of the oil, how Kryptonians had at some point evolved just the right cones in their eyes to capture the wavelengths of light the oil gave off. To Kara, the oil apparently glowed a colour that had no real equivalent for the human spectrum of light, described as ‘like if all of the primary colours were combined but didn’t turn brown’.

Personally, she could feel the oil with enough intensity to know the rough shape of the patterns. Kara had drawn looping, circular glyphs across both of her cheeks, which had been tailed by smaller and smaller glyphs, drawing a curved arch down to her chin, where the two arches met and formed the glyph of House El. There were more nonsensical designs elsewhere, looping down from her temples, crawling across the surface of her forehead, shaped to resemble a branch of some kind, built from fractals. Each prong in the branch was itself a smaller version of the larger design, and Kara had been forced to use a brush to get all of them.

Nodding resolutely, Kara beamed a smile in her direction. “It looks good. I was worried I wouldn’t remember how to induct someone properly.”

Addy tried to keep the discomfort off of her face. Kara was _so_ happy, she liked this so much, she was clearly enjoying revisiting her past. Each time Addy had risen to the occasion to prove that she wanted to take part in her culture, Kara had become happier. This was definitely up there for how excited and relieved Kara was acting, though it still didn’t trump her ability to spend a sleepless night with Kara a few days ago completely learning _Kryptahniuo_ from start to finish. Kara still thought it was the product of Kryptonian genetics, citing the fact that Kryptonians were notorious for their ability to learn languages due to the way their brain was structured and the high degree of neuroplasticity they had.

She couldn’t bring herself to tell Kara that she had been fundamentally created to parse and process information, and all languages were exactly that: methods to transmit and receive information, achieved through a variety of different verbal and non-verbal mechanics. Learning _Kryptahniuo_ had been as difficult as learning the bulk majority of languages on the planet, and that had taken her almost no time at all, though the latter had something of an advantage over the former due to her past connection to the network providing her with a near-endless source of usable examples to study and make assumptions from.

A wet cloth brushing across the surface of her face, finally freeing her skin from the overly-warm, humid embrace of scented oils, jarred her out of the memories. Addy blinked a few times, trying to work her mind back into the present, collecting herself, and caught sight of Kara smiling sheepishly down at her.

“Sorry,” she said at last, carefully wiping away the complex design near her chin. “I noticed you were uncomfortable.”

Had she? Addy needed to work on that. Taylor had been more than capable of hiding her outermost feelings, and by all accounts she had played a significant part in that. “It’s okay,” Addy said, at last, grimacing when her tongue came into contact with the washcloth’s tag, the unpleasant taste of paper somehow making her want to grind her teeth. “It’s important to you.”

“Mmhm,” Kara agreed wordlessly, cloth dabbing away at some of the oil that had gotten stuck behind her earlobe. “But I’m sure you’ll do it well, and this was mostly for me.”

 _I like doing things for you_ , Addy wanted to say. It was true, too; she was used to being given tasks and then fulfilling them. There was something deeply soothing about doing something and being told she had done it well. Praise, acknowledgement, working through problems that upset her but still finishing it anyway—they were new constructs, things she hadn’t had the depth to appreciate back before she had fused with Taylor’s body, and she was starting to realize that it was rather addictive. Seeing people proud of her for overcoming something was simply fulfilling, emotionally speaking.

Wadding the washcloth up into a ball, Kara turned on heel and began plodding over towards the kitchen. “You can get up now! We’re done for today!”

Addy breathed out, glancing down at herself. Like Kara, she hadn’t bothered to switch out her pyjamas. Today, she was wearing duck-print sleeping shorts that barely reached her knees, and that had long, dangly white drawstrings that she felt the impulsive urge to tug on. It was a ‘get well soon and thank you for saving me from being murdered’ - his words, not hers - present from Winn. Her shirt was another gift, this time from Lucy, who had followed Winn’s example and gotten her a shirt that was so large it nearly covered the shorts entirely and was completely and utterly covered by cartoon depictions of geese with various sharp implements, ranging from knives to swords to spears and even one - located about where her tailbone was - with a black, hooded cloak and a scythe nearly three times its size.

It was all very delightful. She was incredibly glad her friends were coming around to the truth about geese in general, and about their merits as birds equally capable of birdsong. Sure, James was still unconvinced and Kara hadn’t been subtle about her aversion towards the birds, and didn’t seem to be changing anytime soon, but she had, at the very least, gotten two allies.

The sound of the faucet turning off drew her attention back in, turning her head off to the side to watch Kara carefully squeeze the cloth out over the sink, oily water drooling down onto the metal surface. Thankfully, as expected, things had settled; Kara was no longer spending the majority of every day tending to emergencies from recently-traumatized citizens, and the number of thefts had gone down significantly. Admittedly it was only four days after Myriad had gone live - and had been promptly shut off - and there was still a not-insignificant chance of this simply being a lull in the panic, but National City had bounced back surprisingly well from something like that.

Then again, apparently city-destroying dilemmas were relatively common on this planet, and not in the form of Endbringers, whose sole purpose had not been to be one-on-one combatants, but rather to serve as unavoidable hazards, cycled in and out to cause the maximum chance of fresh triggers during and shortly following them. Without powers playing a part in any of this, and with Myriad not simultaneously destroying the city or rendering it uninhabitable due to some secondary element - radiation, mastered sleeper agents, extreme flooding - things were, finally, starting to return to normal.

Pushing herself up from the stiff wooden chair she’d been perched on, Addy made her way further into the living room, around the coffee table - where her laptop sat - and dropped herself down onto the couch with a huff. The television was on one of the cartoon channels, muted a long time ago, and was currently playing a rerun of a show she didn’t particularly like, so she felt no need to change that. Her laptop was still sleeping, the screen off, and again, she felt no need to change that.

She was content. It was nice to just exist. She had said it before, but existing as humans did had been at the same time scary and very thrilling, and in small doses like this, listening to the sound of wind whistling through the open gap in the window, the sound of Kara humming some sort of song from her home, it made her chest feel warm. Emotions weren’t supposed to infringe on physical aspects of her consciousness, but she couldn’t say that she didn’t appreciate that they did.

With a _splat_ , Kara dropped the soaked washcloth back into the sink and walked back towards her, settling down into the seat across from the couch.

For a moment, they just both sat in silence. Relaxed. Calm.

“Thank you,” Kara said quietly, almost tremulously.

Addy blinked sluggishly, trying to bat away at the drowsiness that had crept into her focus. That was another odd thing, feeling _calm_ and _content_ meant her body wanted to sleep. Which was counterproductive, considering sleeping, despite being relatively decent at energy retention, was very ineffective at gathering the necessary resources to continue functioning. If one was content, why not use that state of mind to further past goals? To hunt for more resources?

Learning how to be human—it was obviously still a work in process. She could admit that much.

“Why?” Addy found herself asking without really thinking about it, stretching one leg out to give it a few floppy twitches against the arm of the couch.

Kara’s lips pursed, her head tilted back, eyes staring distantly up at the ceiling. She reached up, fiddled with the glasses perched on her nose. “Krypton—the culture there, it was... it wasn’t something you can really _learn_ second hand,” she said, at last. “When I arrived to find that Kal-El had learned everything from a codex, a storage device giving all the information, the practices, but never the context, it _hurt_. Those storage drives were supposed to be supplemental, not his entire education on Krypton.”

Addy remained quiet, more than able to read that Kara just needed to talk. She shut her eyes, let the words wash over her, but kept a steady rock to her foot, tried to work the energy back out of her system before she might do something like kick a remote again.

“Growing up on Krypton, it’s—it’s very different. We might look the same, I can pass as human, sure, but culturally? We’re so different. Humans don’t really do communal raising in most situations, but on Krypton we did. Children had parents, sure, and they were _close_ to those parents, they were their main caretakers, but it wasn’t like it is here. There’s less of a connection, on Krypton you’re born when your parents mix biological material in a machine called a Birthing Matrix.” There was the sound of her shuffling, the seat creaking as Kara leaned further back into it. “Kal-El was an exception there. Oh was that _ever_ a scandal, Uncle Jor-El and Aunt Lara Lor-Van—having a kid without the matrix? It was unfathomable, Kryptonians aren’t exactly fertile, Addy. We genetically engineered a solution to that, sure, but the state of our planet impacted that a lot. Natural births are— _were_ very rare.”

Kara breathed out. It wasn’t quite a sigh, not by what Addy could hear, it was too light for that, but it was close. “It’s why we do adoptions. Blood pedigree, it didn’t really matter, after a certain point. There was the assumption that if you are born to the matrix, which is a relatively exclusive privilege, a lot of people just _didn’t_ have kids, our planet wasn’t able to support everyone having one, just enough to keep our population at or around 2 billion, that your parents were being chosen for a good reason. Every child born on Krypton was to be cherished, and every child was, to some extent, equal—we still had social strata, I won’t paint Krypton as benevolent, I’ve... learned that things aren’t so black and white. Big houses, like my own, would adopt children if they lost their parents or were willingly offered to us _for_ adoption. It didn’t matter who they were born to, just that they could be a part of the family.”

Addy blinked sluggishly. Bad idea to close her eyes, she was even more sleepy now. She pushed herself up with her elbow, levering her body to press her back against the arm of the couch. Keeping upright should help.

Kara smiled almost indulgently at her out of the corner of her eye.

“Which is why when I found out Kal-El had grown up completely without—”

 _BANG_.

Kara jolted in her seat. Addy did too, her head snapping around to the door.

“Kara!” Alex’s voice yelled, the sound of her fist hitting the door again jarring the world back into sharp clarity. Addy didn’t even need to focus to blink away the sluggishness, the drowsiness that tended to linger and cling to the edges of her vision, that made her eyelids so heavy. The panic in Alex’s voice was enough to banish all of that. “Addy! Kara!” Another bang, harder than the last, more sloppy.

Kara was on her feet, rushing towards the door, clearly hearing the panic as well. Alex got another burst of closed-fist pounding on the door before Kara could arrive, flicking the lock and pulling it open with a heavy tug. Alex’s fist, mid-swing, missed the now moved door and bounced harmlessly against her sister.

She looked awful. Alex had always been put together, strikingly like Taylor in that way. Even when in casual clothes, she wore herself with a certain confidence, a certain degree of refinement that made sure people knew she meant business. This Alex was nothing like that. Her hair was haphazard, cowlicked in eight different directions, messy and tangled and clearly untended to. The lines on her face were deeper than they normally wound, pointing towards exhaustion, and her uniform was missing its normal jacket and was skewed slightly off-frame. She was breathing hard and her face was blotchy to match, a virulent red that looked overly warm.

“Alex?” Kara said, voice anxious.

Alex breathed for a few moments, heaving each breath out, her clenched fist turning into a curled grip on Kara’s nape, soon matched by her other hand coming up to rest on the other side. “It’s an emergency,” she finally said, voice a croak, rough from disuse or yelling, Addy couldn’t tell. She looked up, long and hard, staring Kara dead in the eyes with something Addy could almost identify as desperation. “Fort Rozz—it’s _moving_.”

* * *

The D.E.O. was a hive of activity by the time they all arrived. Addy had been able to keep pace with Kara on the flight over, in large part due to her needing to carry her sister at speeds that wouldn’t kill her, and in part since Alex was clearly not put-together enough to endure a rough flight.

Hundreds of people milled, moving in and out of the main operation area. Some faces, Addy could recognize; Susan Vasquez was manning the main console, face a hard cast of worry. Winn was next to her, a plethora of technology plugged into an outlet someone had obviously obtained for him, connected back to a plug in the wall. Maxwell Lord stood beside an older, bald man in full military fatigues, carefully taking drinks from a thermos with one hand while in his other he held a phone, eyes trained down on it.

The bald man turned on their arrival, clearly expecting it. He eyed both of them with distrust, thinly-veiled distaste, even, and beside her, Kara made a face of frustration. “General Lane,” she said, voice loud enough to cut through the din, dozens upon dozens of heads turning to look at the two of them as they approached.

“Supergirl,” General Lane said, voice thin and distrustful. His beady eyes flicked to her, cold and distant. “Administrator.”

Still, it never hurt to be polite. She bobbed her head in a silent greeting, and when her eyes flicked up to glance at him, he’d either accepted it or dismissed it, eyes returning to Kara.

“Fort Rozz, Al—Agent Danvers said it was moving?” Kara asked, pace coming to a halt just shy of the raised platform where Maxwell and General Lane were standing.

“Towards National City,” Maxwell agreed mildly, turning his phone around and holding it up for the two of them to see. On it, a news feed continuously scrolled, showing station-after-station picking up on Fort Rozz’s movement, though nobody had pictures of the place itself.

Which, actually, speaking of. “What is Fort Rozz?”

Heads turned to her, Kara staring incredulously, General Lane grimly, Maxwell emptily. She felt the urge to balk under it, but knew better than to give ground to anyone but Kara, keeping her chin upraised, jaw firm, just like Taylor always did.

“Fort Rozz, Administrator,” Maxwell began, voice solemn. “Was an alien prison that housed the majority of the aliens you’ve had the displeasure of meeting. Non, Astra, that Citadelian - which, good job, by-the-by—”

“Mr. Lord,” General Lane cut in, voice dripping with disdain. “Cut the excess chatter.”

Maxwell rolled his eyes. “Yessir,” he said, completely disingenuously. Oddly, unlike most of the times Maxwell acted that way, she did not feel the urge to throw him through a wall. “Point is, it was a Kryptonian base that landed on Earth, full of alien criminals, who had taken over the facility shortly after Krypton exploded. Speaking of, can you bring up a visual for it, Mr. Schott?”

Winn jolted, glancing around, clearly having not followed the conversation. “Oh, er, right, one second...”

The variety of screens behind Maxwell flickered, changing to a still image. Floating over a wide stretch of dry, wheat-yellow grasslands, was a huge ship. It was constructed as a pair of rings, one inside of the other, easily as tall as the CatCo building. It was made out of gray metal, likely something else foreign she had yet to stumble onto in this universe, seeing as the closest equivalents of a material of a similar look would crumple like cardboard when constructed like that somewhere with Earth’s gravity.

“You can’t shoot it down, can you?” Kara said, staring at the image herself.

General Lane’s face pinched, twisted almost into a rictus of hate, but smoothed out after another moment. “No, we cannot.”

“It was built that way,” Kara continued. “The Phantom Zone—where Fort Rozz was located, it’s... not impossible to get into or leave, but it’s difficult, and they still couldn’t take their chances. It was being constantly upgraded with state-of-the-art defensive and offensive ordinances, I think? My mom mentioned it a few times, now that I’m thinking about it.”

The screens changed, obviously prompted by her words. The still image turned into a video, the huge ship moving steadily through the air. From behind, black dots flickered on the horizon, growing rapidly larger, missiles that flew right at it, leaving behind a smoky trail. The first missile didn’t even get into range, dozens of panels opening up on Fort Rozz’s exterior, hundreds of cannon-like weapons slotting out, firing a salvo of crimson-red lasers that shredded through it, causing it to detonate in the air, the screen shaking from the force. Two-dozen missiles followed, however, and one even managed to get through the carnage of red splitting the sky—except, about fifty or seventy meters from the surface of Fort Rozz, it simply exploded. The air shimmered under the impact, dappled like ripples on a pond, expanding out over a spherical, mostly-invisible shield that encircled the entire thing.

“Why was it out there in the first place?” Kara asked a few moments after the video cut back to the still image, head turning towards General Lane.

“Unlike some of us, Supergirl, we cannot move something that large - and _heavy_ \- on our own, nor did we have the tools to break down whatever it was made out of.” He spoke each word like it was a personal curse, a taint, with the reluctance of someone who had never admitted fault before. “So, we restricted who could enter the area and turned on the cloaking field until we could find a way to break it down.”

“Clearly you didn’t put enough observation on it, as someone has been living in there long enough to learn how to pilot it,” Maxwell said, a bit droll.

To his credit, General Lane didn’t rise to the bait.

“I’m calling Kal,” Kara said without preamble, reaching into the pocket of her suit to tug out a phone. Turning, she glanced towards her sister, who inclined her head in the direction of what Addy remembered was the space they kept the hologram of Kara’s mother—Alura, if she was not mistaken, and the two of them marched wordlessly towards it.

Addy smoothed one hand over the fabric of her own costume. It was the same design as last time, though this time she’d settled for the circuit-like design to be uniformly red, to reflect her current mood. She was calm, yes, but the underlying panic was still there. “Have you tried nuclear weapons?” she asked, rather simply.

General Lane’s head swivelled towards her. His face twisted again, as though reluctant. “We considered it,” he said, voice completely and utterly monotone. “But going by the data we obtained through the video and other missile attempts, we ascertained even a nuclear warhead would lack the available firepower to punch through the shielding system. As the _Kryptonian_ said, that prison is made from the best technology her planet had.”

Addy wasn’t really sure she appreciated how he said _Kryptonian_ , like the word itself tasted bad, but didn’t comment.

Not that it stopped General Lane, as his focus remained wholly on her, eyes narrowed. “My daughter,” he said at last, voice hard and cold. “Said you kept her safe during the mind control incident.”

His daughter?—Oh. Lucy. “I did,” she said, simply.

“I don’t appreciate her consorting with aliens, especially illegal ones,” he began, voice rough, a low rumble. Maxwell, a few steps away from him, bristled for reasons Addy neither knew nor cared to look into. “And you will never have her under your influence again, are we clear?”

“I don’t like being threatened.” It probably wasn’t a good thing to say, or even remotely the smartest, but it needed to _be_ said. She didn’t, and would not stand for it, if at all possible. “But I do understand.”

General Lane, surprisingly, nodded. It was a curt, firm nod, and there was still no respect in his gaze, but he still did it. “Good. Otherwise, thank you for keeping my daughter safe.”

“Lucy’s important,” Addy offered, feeling the words were a bit pointless.

General Lane nodded again. “That she is.”

“Ah, I’ve, er, got something? A few somethings?” Winn interrupted, glancing between the two of them with an oddly fragile look. “Can I broadcast this? It seems important, and it’s being sent to like, every other secure—”

“Mr. Schott,” General Lane said, exasperated. “Do so.”

The screens in front of her flickered on. A man stared back at her from the screen, garbed in an identical black suit to the one she’d witnessed Astra wearing. He wasn’t a pleasant man to look at, not that he was ugly—simply bland. He had short, brownish hair that had receded due to his hairline, a wide jaw, and a resting face that oozed palpable disdain. His eyes were cold, his lips were thinned out into a line, and the lighting for the shot itself only came from below, casting his face in unclear shadows.

“People of National City and Earth,” the man began, his voice sharp, but dead. Almost monotone, if not for the undercurrent of rage beneath it all. “I am General Non. My wife, Astra In-Ze, set out to make this world _better_. She set out to ensure this world would not suffer the fate that Krypton had, that it would not strip itself down to the bone and leave nothing but dead earth in its wake.”

Somewhere behind her, she could hear Kara and Alex approaching, muttering to one another.

“In return for her generosity, you killed her. Even still, I intended to see her plan through—I initiated Myriad, and began the process of ensuring everyone worked together for the betterment of society.” Non didn’t smile, did nothing but stare into the camera for a long, long moment. “You repaid that by destroying even her legacy. The path to the continuation of this world, cut off by those who could not accept that these things have _costs_ , require work and unity.”

Non stepped back from the camera, his broad-shouldered frame coming into focus. His hands folded themselves behind his back, and for the first time some emotion did, finally, show on his face. Anger. It was the sort of anger she had seen on Kara when she had been under the influence of red kryptonite. Rage might be a better word, not that she had much experience from Taylor’s memories when it came to feeling it.

“Now that you have fought against the painless method, we will treat you as the children you are. My demands are simple: all governments will turn their authority over to me, declaring me their ruler. I will take full control over every part of this world, from its industrial sectors to its bureaucracy. I will institute the Kryptonian rule, elevate your kind above their means, to prevent this world from being used up by those ill-prepared to handle it.” Non paused again, not hesitating, not debating with himself, no sign of indecision on his face. He was clearly sure about his actions going into the future—maybe he just wanted them to squirm. “I will begin destroying cities one-by-one until these demands are met. Still, to make an example, I will begin with National City—the place where my wife was slaughtered by unthinking, unknowing reprobates. If you surrender to me before I arrive, I will ensure my arsenal spares as many civilian lives as possible.”

Another pause.

“If you don’t, I will glass the city off of the surface of this planet, and do the same to every other city in my path.”

The screen turned off.

The entire room erupted in noise and chaos.

“Enough!” General Lane barked, loud enough to overwhelm even Winn’s babbling panic. The entire room stilled, quieted. “Mr. Schott, what is the ETA on it arriving within range to attack National City?”

Winn blinked vacantly up at General Lane for a moment before quickly glancing back down. “At least an hour, er, sir.”

The words settled everyone, surprisingly even Addy. She felt that tight knot of dread in her chest unravel, pull apart into loose strands. An hour or more, that wasn’t a lot, but it was something.

“We need to begin evacuations,” General Lane said solemnly. “That and begin drafting plans for retaliatory action—”

“I’m not sure if you’ve forgotten,” Maxwell interrupted, voice tight. “But our strongest weapon, a nuclear bomb, is unlikely to put a dent in their defences. _What_ , retaliatory action, do you think we can achieve?”

“I have contacts,” General Lane cut in with a swipe of his hand. “Contacts which understand alien tech, have methods to counteract it.”

“Cadmus,” Kara said hollowly. “You want to call in _Cadmus_.”

General Lane flicked his head around to her. “And how would you know about that?” He less asked, more demanded, voice going dark.

The people around her began to stir, grow unsettled.

“It’s my job to keep dangers to the public under my radar,” Kara bit back, the compassion she normally wore in her voice long gone, replaced by something bitter and harsh. “Can you say the same?”

Addy glanced back towards Kara, to Alex who was standing firmly at her side. Taking slow steps back, she took up Kara’s other side, shoulder-to-shoulder. A show of support, showing where her allegiance was.

If the way General Lane looked at her for a moment, hostile and violent, he got the message.

“Enough.”

Heads turned, Addy felt like she was moving in slow motion. She glanced behind her, stared bewilderingly at J’onn, at _Hank_ , his face still so familiar, so warm. She liked him, she wanted to hug him, but he wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t safe here, he was supposed to be on the run.

General Lane’s eyes narrowed. “ _You_. You are wanted on charges of treason.” His voice was almost giddy, nearly ecstatic. “Arrest the Martian!”

Only the people behind General Lane, those wearing similar military fatigues, moved. They reached for their guns, but paused when they saw that nobody else was doing the same.

General Lane scanned the room. “I _said_ , arrest the Martian!”

Again. Nobody moved.

“I know how to get into Fort Rozz,” J’onn continued flatly, hands resting at his side, still wearing the D.E.O.-issued fatigues that she had come to associate him with. She wondered if he could shapeshift clothing—but that was a later thing to look into. He was okay, he was safe, even if he had left right after she had done so much _awful_ to him, had twisted him like that, he was fine. He was alive. “And I intend to help, with or without your permission. It would go against who I am, who I have become over time, to let this happen without stepping in.”

“Arrest him!” General Lane yelled again. People did move this time, but instead of to his wills, several agents - including Susan, to Addy’s swelling pride and appreciation - drew weapons and aimed them towards the soldiers in uniform.

For a moment, everything was silent. J’onn stood grimly, eyes forward, and General Lane stared at him, overtaken by hatred. He wasn’t even hiding it, didn’t even bother to pretend he felt anything different.

Then, finally, General Lane brought one arm up, the top of his hand facing the soldiers behind him. “Guns down,” he said, sounding like he was pulling teeth.

* * *

“ _J’onn_ ,” Alex choked, wrapping the Martian up in a hug.

Addy, sitting on a chair a ways behind them, watched quietly.

“It’s good to see you again, Agent Danvers,” J’onn rumbled back, a fondness in his voice as he smoothed his hand in circles around Alex’s back.

“How—how did you even get here?” Alex choked out, still hugging him fiercely.

Addy started to feel like she was intruding. That feeling came back again, _guilt_ , raw and visceral, just like it had back when she knew Alex had killed Astra but hadn’t told Kara, out of fear that doing so would irreparably damage Kara and Alex’s relationship without the words coming from Alex herself. She’d considered mind-controlling Alex a few times to make her do it back then, but in hindsight, mind control wasn’t always an effective avenue to fix things.

“I came back as soon as I heard about Myriad,” J’onn said, easing himself free of Alex’s hug. “And I remained for the days since, preparing to move south, towards Mexico. I was keeping watch on all of you”—rather than skip her, J’onn’s eyes landed on her too, softened like they always did, which confused Addy because she’d hurt him more than anyone in doing what she did—“and it wasn’t hard to follow both yourself and Supergirl back once I saw you rush out of the D.E.O.”

Alex blinked tearily, reaching up to scuff the heels of her palms against her eyes. “Speaking of, where is she?”

That, Addy, could answer. Pointing towards the door with her good arm, she tried her best to meet Alex’s eyes, despite the comfort. “Getting Kal-El. He texted her that he was here and they weren’t letting him through.”

“Fucking Lane,” Alex snarled rather abruptly, loud enough that it echoed off of the enclosed training room they’d commandeered. “He took over for Jim Harper, who was his own sort of awful, but he’s been worse. Half of the fucking time I spend here is making sure he can’t whisk alien detainees off to be cut apart for pieces in Cadmus!”

“Calm,” J’onn said, resting both of his hands on Alex’s shoulders, who slumped in response. “It’s okay. We’re here now, we have a plan, we just have to work with what we have.”

Alex nodded, breathing heavily. “Sorry, sir. Just a bit stressed.”

J’onn smiled humourlessly. “I can only imagine.”

Then, he turned to her. Addy couldn’t bring herself to meet people’s eyes on a good day, it was hard and uncomfortable and she _really_ disliked being on the other end of a stare. This? This was even worse, she couldn’t imagine looking him in the face, let alone his eye, and instead directed her gaze to the floor. She felt nauseated, she felt _ill_ , like she was going to get sick even despite not eating anything that would upset her digestional tract.

Slowly, footsteps echoed out, steadily growing louder as they approached. The air was silent, Addy pulled in closer to herself, ran fingers over the fabric on her thigh.

Arms closed around her in a very light hug. The sort of hug you give to someone when you’re not sure about your boundaries.

“It’s good to see you too, Administrator,” J’onn said, ever-so-gently.

Addy’s breath hitched. “I hurt you.”

“It wasn’t you,” J’onn refuted, not sharply, but firmly. Absolute.

She shook her head, pressing her hand against him, putting distance. He let go willingly, gave her the space she needed to breathe and not feeling the texture of everything chafing against her skin. What she did to him—the knowledge had come after, had come after spending a night reviewing all of her memories over and over again. What J’onn’s psychic connection was, it was... personal, and what she did to it, unforgivable. It was a gross breach of trust, it was a molestation.

“I forgive you,” J’onn said.

Addy swallowed thickly. _You shouldn’t_ , she wanted to say, but couldn’t. “Why?”

J’onn breathed out, a low, shaky sort of noise. “Because, Administrator, you’re acting the way you are for a reason. You realized what you did, how wrong it was, how much it hurt, and the fact that you have, and feel so guilty and upset, proves that you understand the weight of your actions. You are repenting, as much as you are able, and that’s all I need.”

She glanced up, finally, stared at J’onn’s warm expression, the faded smile on his lips. The softness in his stance when he looked at her, the way he just knew she would balk against his more brusque behaviour. “I still feel bad.”

“You should,” J’onn said simply, and Addy could appreciate that too. “But the fact that you do is the most important part, you’ll make amends, we’ll make amends, on our own time. But we’re family, Addy, that’s all that matters.”

Right. They were family, because J’onn had taken Alex and Kara under wing as a father figure. He was trying to do the same for her. She was part of that family, she was part of who _he_ considered to be family. It made her feel both warm and sick at the same time, she wanted it, but she felt like she shouldn’t.

Still, she would not shut down. She would not curl up and pretend nothing was wrong. Those were not behaviours that led to advancements in personal growth. She knew that. “Okay,” she said, at last, because it was all she could.

J’onn smiled.

“That was Kara,” Alex announced, breaking through the atmosphere. Addy glanced her way, finding Alex half-hunched, staring down at her phone. “Superman’s here. They want us back in the main area, we need to plan.”

Glancing back towards J’onn, she watched him reach out with one hand towards her, an offer to help her up. She didn’t need it, she could, if all else failed, simply fly until she was upright, but nevertheless she felt compelled to take it. Her hand was small in his, surprisingly, and his palm was warm, warmer than she normally was, warmer than Kara, even.

Pulling her upright, J’onn then let go.

Addy flexed her fingers, tried to understand what she felt as the transferred warmth gradually faded from her fingers.

“Let us go, Administrator, Agent Danvers. We have a world to save.”

* * *

Clark and Kara, both in costume, stood at one end of a table. Spread across the table was a wide map, with a small device projecting a small holographic copy of Fort Rozz on it. The pace it was moving at was slow, slow enough that it took several seconds for Addy to recognize that it was moving, and it was about a pencil’s length away from a small red dot on the map marked with ‘National City’ in huge black letters.

“I’m not sure what you’re implying, General Lane,” Clark responded to something Addy hadn’t heard, his voice cool, flat. He stared at the man across from him like an old enemy, and Addy wasn’t entirely sure if that wasn’t exactly the case.

“It is Kryptonian tech,” General Lane grit out, fingers clenching at his sides. “Surely you understand the responsibi—”

“Addy! J’onn!” Kara called out, entirely unprompted, glancing back towards them.

General Lane stared daggers at her, not that she was looking his way to see them.

“J’onn,” Clark greeted, briefly turning his head to stare at him. His tone was cool, if not as cold as the one he used on General Lane.

J’onn inclined his head. “Superman.”

The rest of the walk over was done in silence, General Lane silently seething on one end, Clark staring down at the map in front of him, Kara looking between the three of them. Alex walked stiffly, like she wasn’t sure how to hold herself around both J’onn and General Lane. By contrast, J’onn walked confidently, snaking between agents who looked happy to see him, not hesitating even a beat.

“You’re the premier expert on Fort Rozz, right J’onn?” Clark asked, not glancing away from the map even as J’onn came to a rest beside him, Addy next to Kara, and Alex next to herself.

J’onn nodded. “I spent a lot of time looking into it—I understand the technology used better than most. I had intended to put forward a possible mission to return it to space, before I was apprehended, though I hadn’t got very far.”

“Then,” Clark began, the word spoken slowly. “What do you recommend for bringing it down? We don’t have any real plans here, other than ‘hit it and hope it gives before we do’.”

In theory, that could work. Again, most things were achievable with enough applied force, it was just that the amount of force required tended to scale exponentially. Depending on how powerful the shielding system was on Fort Rozz, they would need an impossibly vast amount of force to bring it down, something they might not be able to do without risking everything near it.

“The prison is powered by an omegahedron,” J’onn explained, drawing a hiss of surprise out of Kara. He glanced her way, and she inclined her head. “For those who aren’t Kryptonians, an omegahedron is a piece of highly valuable tech which produces vast quantities of energy and has the ability to manipulate matter on a molecular level. Generally, they were used on Krypton to power entire cities, cities which required vast amounts of energy. Arguably, a dozen of them would be enough to power the entirety of Earth.”

“Then how can we bring the shields down?” Kara said, and she sounded actually somewhat terrified. “Omegahedrons—you can’t just overwhelm them. They’re the pinnacle of Kryptonian tech, they’re the size of a baseball and have more than enough energy to outlast us.”

“You use another omegahedron,” J’onn said flatly, his gaze directed right at Clark.

Clark looked back at him, then sighed. “I have an extra,” he admitted roughly, reaching up to palm at his face. He glanced Kara’s way, winced. “From your pod, I didn’t want the D.E.O. getting its hands on it.”

“This still doesn’t fix that we don’t have any way on,” Alex pointed out.

“We do,” J’onn said firmly. “While Fort Rozz was designed to protect against people attempting to attack it and release the criminals inside, and has countermeasures to ensure you cannot simply phase through it or teleport onto it, it was built in space and built defences for the ones it would need in the Phantom Zone. Things are different in the Phantom Zone, it’s a point where spacetime is out of line, it makes a lot of powers, such as my own ability to phase through solid matter, likely to fail lethally. Boarding Fort Rozz isn’t an issue, not for me, not in Earth’s atmosphere, but leaving it—I know for sure they have anti-Martian fields on the ship itself, they had too many White Martians not to, so leaving it will be the issue.”

“You want to go alone,” Alex said, with sudden dawning horror. Addy felt it too.

J’onn smiled, it didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s my duty—”

“I can come.”

Heads turned to her. Addy had blurted plenty of things impulsively since she’d taken up Taylor’s body, the experience was no longer novel and new, but this, this certainly was. She reached back to her memories, rifled through them, brought up the notes she left on her experiences accessing J’onn’s powers. J’onn’s powers, they were all tied to his psychic ability, there was a strong link there, and she had enough data to know that she could interface with him. It would require augmenting things again, she’d have to adjust to create a pseudo-host situation with J’onn, which would require an accelerated node growth, however minuscule, to offer that connection, but if she connected interdimensionally to him, it was possible she could work that way.

She didn’t want to. She hated the idea of connecting to anyone else but Taylor but she would still be in her body and it wouldn’t be like before. She wouldn’t be an observer, she would simply be drawing his powers through that link between herself and J’onn and having them apply to her at the same time they did him. It probably wouldn’t even work on any other person, not unless she found an equally powerful telepath with powers purposefully tuned to the telepathic one.

It was still part of her powers—part of what The Warrior couldn’t strip away. She might not be able to do the same to other shards, but she could do it to their _hosts_ , it was a prerequisite for a power-based trigger. Given that, if she modified J’onn just enough to be similar to a host, she could access his powers, draw them into her, and avoid the blockage The Warrior left for her in the first place.

“You can,” J’onn said blankly.

Addy nodded slowly. “I can make a connection between us,” she said slowly, the guilt filling her back up. He had forgiven her, and she had to do this again. “I can go with you, onto the ship. Fuse with your powers to some extent.”

It was really only possible because Taylor had a connection node. She’d more or less be drawing part of J’onn’s power to her coreself and then shunting that power directly into her body. It would severely hamper the intensity of the power, yes, there would be a lot of energy loss, but she could.

Only if J’onn consented. And from the way he was looking at her, not afraid, not scared, but worried—worried for _her_ , he might not.

She tried to copy Taylor for a moment, tried to straighten her shoulders, grit her jaw, stop slouching her spine, but discarded it. No, pretending to be Taylor, imitating her, it wasn’t useful right now. J’onn wasn’t worried about Taylor or worried about her feelings, he was worried about her. So, instead, she just... looked at him, looked at him like she let herself look at Kara when they were at the apartment, like he was the center of her world because he was _important_ and losing him would be a blow to her that would feel too much like Taylor to cope.

Kara and Clark remained silent, and Addy to a point wanted to know if they disagreed with her desire, her decision. If they had concerns, or if they were letting her do this because it was important to her, because they knew she needed to.

Finally, with a breath, J’onn nodded.

Addy felt the weight leave her shoulders.

“So, you two will board Fort Rozz,” General Lane started up again, motioning towards the holographic representation. “Bring the omegahedron with you, overload the one on the ship with it, and then what?”

“Overloading the omegahedron should do a few things,” J’onn picked up, folding his hands on the table politely. “It’ll, for starters, bring the entire thing down—all of the ship’s flight abilities are tied to it, it’s too expensive otherwise. It should get rid of the shield, and it should also make the materials the ship is made out of weaker. I believe Fort Rozz is primarily made out of nth metal, a complicated alloy with some unexplainable properties, but it’s being reinforced by the omegahedron to survive on Earth. As I said before, Fort Rozz was built in space and then moved to the Phantom Zone, it was never intended to be in an atmosphere, it’s why it is moving so slowly, despite having made the trip between here and the opening in the Phantom Zone faster than any human-made spacecraft could achieve. It is not suited for atmospheric flight, and neither is its construction.”

“What exactly will we be doing?” Kara asked, her voice focused, intense, but utterly flat, giving away nothing about what she was currently feeling.

“Ensuring that Non doesn’t send out raiding parties of Kryptonians, or if he does, that those Kryptonians don’t get near civilians. That and ensuring that when the ship goes under, you can prevent it from landing on anything important. You’ll also be necessary for when the prison is opened, you’ll need to be there to fight Non’s forces at least.” J’onn glanced towards Clark, then back towards Kara. “Can you do that? I realize some of these are your people, among the last.”

Kara wet her lower lip with a flick of her tongue, glancing at Clark. “They ceased being anything more than the imperial remnants of my planet’s dark history when they decided to hold a planet hostage,” she said, each word into the sentence being more firm, more resolute and sure. Something settled in her posture, the hesitance leaving, and for a moment Addy couldn’t see Kara Danvers, only Kara Zor-El. The alien, the Kryptonian, a similar cast to her features, almost _imperial_ , to what she had witnessed on Astra’s face. Dignified, distant, and with complete confidence in her own actions.

Clark stared at his cousin for a long moment, likely seeing the same, before, with a touch less grace, he nodded. “Like Zod, they aren’t my family, just people who want to hurt those I want to protect.”

* * *

Fort Rozz was visible in the distance, steadily crawling forward across the sky.

J’onn, to her right, stared at it in silence, clutching the omegahedron Clark had given him before they left.

It was only them, out on the grassy, dried-out hills not too far from National City. The city, if she turned, wasn’t _right_ in sight, but it was only another fifteen or twenty minutes before it hit the city limits.

“Are you sure?” J’onn asked, finally.

Addy glanced his way, ran the plan over in her head again. His powers, from her observations, worked interdimensionally; it would be difficult, but it would work. “Yes.”

J’onn swallowed. “Then you may proceed.”

Addy didn’t hesitate, she reached out again, tugging her psychic powers back into active. Brushing against J’onn’s presence was familiar, warm, there was so much more to it than there had been, back when her mind had been clouded by mental contamination. It was textured, it felt like a limb, like something very real, something deeply personal to J’onn himself. The psychic presence itself reached out to her, a wordless request to connect.

She granted it, and dove in deeper.

His powers flexed, twisted, curled against her. She spent a minuscule amount of energy to slowly grow a portion of the node in his brain, adjusting to Martian physiology. The connection broadened, and she reached deeper inside, felt for the interdimensional energy J’onn had inherently, and tugged it towards herself.

His power—it was primarily that psychic ability, but the psychic ability itself produced the others. Flight, transformation, moving through walls; the only thing it didn’t give was his strength and durability, as those were naturally sourced. They were all drawn from the psychic power, energetic representations of reality-warping, now that she glanced closer.

The lines between herself and J’onn blurred. They blinked as one as she fed his presence into her core-self, redirected it back to her body. Their body.

“Oh,” J’onn said, quiet-like. A moment of independence, drawn from shock, Addy ignored the urge to fold him back into uniformity, as she had done for so many shards before. “This is... you.”

It was. Her psychic powers, it _was_ her. She could not die, because she was not the body she wore, she was not even truly the core of her power. She was a psychic entity, anchored in place by her hub, and given the power needed to function through it. J’onn was himself first, and his psychic powers second, the psychic powers were in a way an extension of him, not impersonal, but not quite the totality of who he was. You could take the psychic powers away and he would remain, hurt, yes, but still J’onn.

If you took her psychic powers away, she would cease to be.

But then, they were not he nor she nor it, they were they. Two people, becoming one for a short period. It was personal, it was melding, it was something one of the two constituents in their new gestalt could do naturally with other Martians, albeit on a smaller scale.

It was something the other part of the gestalt had done her entire life. Administration over others, the unification of the gestalt. Queen Administrator, then Addy, that had never changed. This was part of her knowledge, her skill set, the things not even The Warrior could strip from her, not in their entirety.

J’onn’s power flickered on the edges of their awareness, ready to be used.

They both reached out as one, the dull roar of it filling first one half, then the other half. Addy’s body twisted into red, shimmering energy a few seconds after J’onn’s did, and they lifted off. For a moment, one half was allowed to study the power, curious, before the other half asserted that it was time to go. The halves assented, and they were in unison again.

Moving as energy, as _one_ , was different. There was no friction, no resistance, just slipping through the air, unhindered. It reminded one half of her transits between worlds, but the other half was more familiar, more comfortable with it. The world blurred past, the prison grew larger, they angled their ascent under, going undetected as they reached the range of the weapons, then the barrier, and passed through it all.

Metal bore no resistance to them, neither did energetic fields put between them, to prevent psychic intrusions.

They arrived in the prison as one, then split. The red energy pulled apart into two clumps, and took on two new distinct forms. They were in somewhere dark, the lights above them dim, and the stretch of ground they stood on was metal and long, a wide hallway with prisons built into the walls, all of them empty.

One side of the unison desired to separate. The other half agreed.

They became he and her once again.

Addy crumpled with a noise, reaching up to clutch her head. Pain, acute, brutal agony flickered across her focus as a headache erupted into focus. She crouched, fingers digging into her head as she waited for the agony to disperse, her node throbbing in aching protest.

“Addy?” J’onn murmured, whisper-quiet.

She turned to look at him, and he wasn’t in his Hank form anymore. Gone was the dark-skinned, pug-faced man, and in his place was a green alien, easily eight feet tall and built wide and broad. His face was ostensibly similar in features, composed akin to his human form, but not quite translatable. He was wearing a full black body-suit - which, she supposed, answered her question about his ability to transform clothes - with a wide red ‘X’ cutting across his chest.

He looked at her with worry, with care.

Addy shook her head, trying not to show the pain. “The biological nodes my kind uses to form connections are meant for very specific wavelengths,” she explained, slowly pushing herself to her feet. She wobbled a bit, but eased herself back into a stable stand with a small burst of kinetic flight near the back of her legs. “Your power was similar enough to imitate it, and allow for me to transfer your own power expression into this body, but it still did damage. I will be fine shortly.”

And she was, the pain was already receding, her powers weren’t hampered, it was just pain and some minor damage that her stores of solar energy were already quickly healing over. Glancing up, Addy spared the long stretch of hallway a look, finding a ‘BLOCK E-2’ sign up near the ceiling. “Do you know where to go?”

J’onn followed her gaze, nodding slowly. “We’re right below where the omegahedron should be.”

Addy took a step forward, J’onn did the same, and soon enough they were making their way down the hallway. The prison cells were all empty, if not uniform. A majority of them were unique; some had bars of metal, others had bars of wood, some had no bars at all, replaced instead by a see-through material that had no identifiable door to exit through. The inside of the cells themselves were all off and unlit, but Addy could spot a few odd implements inside, including several light emitters, and in one instance, what looked like a desk fan.

As they walked further down the hallway, the silence began to be interrupted. It was a low murmur of activity, noise, voices speaking in languages Addy hadn’t been introduced to. J’onn glanced her way and, pointedly, rose into the air. Addy followed his example, moving silently behind him as the talking grew louder and louder until, finally, they arrived at a turn in the hall. A full 90-degree turn, at that, with no way to see around it.

J’onn glanced her way again, motioned with his head. It would be best to take them in a direct attack, if possible, then. She could agree with that. Floating up next to him, she focused, waiting for his mark.

J’onn blurred forward, she followed, pulling around the corner, expecting Kryptonians—

The last of the hallway was short, made up of about eight cells all told, with the far end of the hallway leading into a set of stairs. The hallway itself was just as empty as the hallway they’d just come from, but the cells—they certainly weren’t. All eight cells were lit up, unlike all the others, and in them, prisoners.

“Th’fuck are you supposed to be?” A voice asked, Addy turning her head to glance towards it. She was in the cell closest to them, her arms pulled above her by chains and shackles, the walls of her cell seemingly made out of what could only be chromium. Her skin was dark, the same colour J’onn was when in his Hank form, and her hair was frizzy and ginger, with eyes whose irises were a green that almost glowed.

Above her cell, ‘KORIAND’R’ was written across a LED screen.

“...You’re prisoners,” J’onn said, confused, his feet hitting the ground. “I thought—”

The woman _laughed_ , harsh and cruel. “That, what? Non would let any of us out? We aren’t exactly his biggest fucking fans, you fucking idiot. So why do you scuttle back to your stupid fucking leader and tell him you can’t torture or sway any of u—”

“We’re not Non’s people,” J’onn cut in, eyes narrowing. “And you aren’t either, are you?”

“What gave it away?” The woman drawled, speaking over the sound of seven other people trying to yell, to get their attention. She wasn’t wearing much more than a medical slip, a sheet of cloth that barely hid the litany of scars across her person, some looking more recent than others. “The chains, the degrading clothing, or the _fucking torture?_ ”

“Then who are you?” Addy interjected, not wanting to get caught in a cycle.

The woman - Koriand’r - smiled, wide and feral. “I am, well, _was_ , Princess Koriand’r of Tamaran. I was sold by my own family to be a slave to the Citadelians after my sister betrayed us and more or less became their puppet queen. I gutted the Citadelian leader, destroyed Complex-Complex, and returned home to behead my sister and stick her fucking skull on a pike. Of course, what I did was very illegal and the Kryptonians stepped in to ‘try me neutrally’, despite, you know, being a slave, and them being against it. I got a life’s sentence, on Fort Rozz, which as you know is basically forever. Or at least it was.”

J’onn stared at her. Addy stared at her.

She was almost certain the majority of the other prisoners were staring at Koriand’r.

“And, lemme make you a deal. I want revenge for Non keeping me in cuffs, you want to presumably take him down. You let me and my friends out, and we ensure you do that.”

J’onn glanced around, Addy following his gaze. Most of the other cells didn’t have LED signs or names above them, just people inside. Two people, in cells side-by-side, were clearly of the same species, purple-coloured and with heads that ended in a tentacle-like tail. The rest were a mix of human-like and humanoid, the majority wouldn’t look out of place in a crowd, if they had some make-up anyway.

“Before you ask, most of us here aren’t the ones even Non was afraid to let out. You’ve got a pair of White Martians a few floors up from us, in the little wing he keeps for all the aliens even Non can’t respect. We?” Koriand’r motioned vaguely with her foot, her eyes growing cold. “We’re political prisoners, or people who disagreed with him, or just people he _didn’t like_. We’re not about to gut you if you let us out. Or at least, I won’t, I have no idea about Klick.”

“Hey!” One of the purple prisoners said.

“Fuck you!” The other one said, in rhythm.

Koriand’r rolled her eyes.

J’onn, finally, glanced back at her. “Do you think we should?”

Addy glanced around, between each member. She could scour their memories, open up her connection again and work through their minds, but it would take time. Time they didn’t have before Fort Rozz reached National City and it’d already be too late.

J’onn was the better versed one, who knew more, who understood alien politics better than she did. Still, power in numbers was important, significant, and if they did face Kryptonian resistance, they would need all the help they could get. It still felt nice that he was asking her first, that he was taking her into account.

“I do,” she said, finally.

“Bitchin’,” Koriand’r said, motioning with her leg again. “Get me out and I’ll get the others, would you?”

J’onn glanced her way one last time before nodding, shimmering back into red energy before passing through the cell bars, reconsolidating in front of Koriand’r. He reached forward, grabbed her shackles, and _tore_ , the metal giving beneath his strength with a loud, booming creak, pieces falling away.

Koriand’r’s arms fell to her sides, her hands rubbing appreciatively at her wrists as she stumbled to a stand.

“Do you need the door—”

A flick of Koriand’r’s wrist and Addy was swerving out of the way as a concentrated blast of energy tore the bars to shreds in an instant, all but disintegrating under the force. “You know,” Koriand’r said, stepping over the smouldering husk of her prison. “I really fucking hate Psions—absolute monsters, but if I can give them anything...” She reached out with one hand, green energy pooling between her fingers, growing brighter and more blinding, to the point where Addy had to glance away, just barely catching Koriand’r making a swipe with one hand, a curve of energy shearing through every last cell wall on the side she was facing, releasing four. “...they really know how to make someone into a weapon.”

J’onn stepped out behind her as Koriand’r approached and did the same to the other prisons, ripping through them with concentrated green blasts, the metal giving with an unholy scream.

The two purple aliens, as soon as they were freed, leapt at one another, their physical forms turning almost liquid as they fused together, twisting. What grew out of the combination of the two was much larger, a head taller than J’onn at the least, with two tails instead of one that descended from the head. The other aliens, freed, wandered cautiously out of their cells, looking varying levels of disbelieving and giddy.

Koriand’r, at the front of the group, cocked her head to one side and clutched her hip with one hand. “So, where the fuck’s Non, anyway?”

J’onn motioned behind her, towards the stairs. “We’re actually going to overload the omegahedron,” he explained tightly. “Non being taken down is more of a secondary role. The prison is currently being used to attack a city.”

“I can do that too,” Koriand’r agreed idly, and it occurred to Addy that she might not be doing this for any real pursuit of revenge, but perhaps mostly because she wanted to hurt something.

She could work with that.

“We don’t have any time to dawdle,” J’onn said, breaking the silence. “We need to move. So if you’re coming, come, if not, find a way to leave.”

Marching forward, the crowd of escaped prisoners parted like a wave for J’onn, and Addy, not seeing any better chance, kept close behind him. A few prisoners, glancing back, did seem to hesitate, but Koriand’r just firmed her face and marched along with them, trailed after by Klick - the purple fusion alien, she imagined - and a handful of others, mostly humanoid looking, though one had torn off a chunk of his prison’s bars and was brandishing a rather heavy chunk of metal like a bat, so looks were probably deceiving on that end.

Arriving at the stairs, J’onn gave up any pretenses at being bound to the earth and started flying. Addy followed after, keeping face, and to her surprise, Koriand’r did too. A few aliens took to the air, though the majority didn’t, rushing after them in a mob as they climbed the stairs in twos or threes.

They skipped the first landing, the second, the third. J’onn kept flying up, every last floor they passed they did so without pausing, without hesitating.

Then, finally, there were no more stairs to climb. They breached to the top floor, passing up through the opening into a wide, circular room that seemed to be the main operating room. There was a large table in its center, with a holographic display showing the various vitals of the ship, and next to it was a tall, pylon-like object, with an identical omegahedron to the one J’onn had contained within.

The room, however, was occupied.

Four heads snapped their way, four faces she didn’t recognize. Two got to their feet in a burst of super speed, Kryptonians, then, she assumed. The other two floated up. From right to left, the first was a woman with long black hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin, the second was an older man with white hair and pale skin freckled by age, and the last two were a pair of male twins, both with a shock of auburn hair and olive-toned skin, with eyes hidden beneath the fringes of their hair.

The rest of the mob they’d brought with them poured out of the opening, without weapons, with only them.

“Seriously?” One of the twins said, sounding exhausted. “You must be—”

Koriand’r lifted her hand and his body vanished behind a scream of green energy. It splashed against the back walls which, unlike everything else, didn’t give, but the wail of agony the twin made was high, reedy, excruciated.

People moved the instant the noise began.

Addy swerved to the side, avoiding the long, black-haired woman’s rush towards her. J’onn swooped in beneath the woman, catching her by one leg and dragging her down, slamming her face-first against the ground and then whipping her up and around, hurtling her towards where the twin still remained, pinned into the dent he made in the wall. The two bodies collided with a grunt.

The other twin shot forward, only to be intercepted by Klick. Klick’s body twisted, pulled apart into thousands of thin ropes that adhered to the surface of the twin and dragged them in. A maw formed in what remained of the malleable purple body, flesh shaping itself into crude approximations of teeth, and the other twin screamed in a panic.

He, like his twin, was blindsided by another concentrated blast of energy from Koriand’r. This time around it wasn’t so much a beam as it was a bolt, arcing forward at high speeds and splashing across the side of his body, sending him hurtling into the ground.

“Klick, don’t eat Kryptonians,” Koriand’r said, sounding surprisingly annoyed. “They won’t digest, you’ll die. Moron.”

“Fuck you!” A chorus of twenty voices said, the body adjusting, pulling itself back together into the humanoid mass of purple she’d seen before. He lashed out with one hand, slamming the woman back into the twin pinned to the wall, keeping her there even as she struggled and kicked, ripping at the purple flesh only for it to stitch itself back together.

He was fascinating, but now was not the time.

The old man, having apparently decided this was an imminent threat, rose into flight and jolted forward. J’onn and herself rose to meet him, her hand reaching out to catch one side of his head while J’onn got the other. He thrashed against them, and he almost got through them, the sheer strength of a Kryptonian was nothing to balk at, but, again, as had happened before, before anything could happen another burst of green caught the Kryptonian in the stomach with enough force to rocket him back into the wall.

“J’onn! The power!” Addy yelled, rushing forward to slam herself bodily into the older one. She adjusted her power’s settings again, reached out with her telepathy, brushed against the Kryptonian’s innate defences. She hated how much energy it would use up to just breach through that, but then at least she wasn’t drawing from her coreself to do so.

She reached inside, overwhelmed the static, and _twisted_.

The old man slumped, unconscious until she would get around to _untwisting_ it.

Breaking the connection, she swerved just in time to watch J’onn shove the omegahedron into the containment field that held the one that was powering the ship. For a moment, nothing happened, and then, _everything_ did. The various electronic displays exploded, shattering glass every-which-way, and the two omegahedrons began to spin around one another in a rapidly-accelerating orbit. Sparks flew, and an orange-red glow settled into the surrounding metal of the walls, the floors, and then began to rapidly recede, pulling in towards where the omegahedron itself was.

The lights all flickered, guttered, and then warning alarms began to wail, loud and high and almost deafening.

J’onn grabbed her arm, pulled her harshly as the two of them flew towards the stairwell. The others scrambled after them, all but falling over themselves down the steps.

The alarm grew increasingly louder, and with it had come a low keening noise. Energy jolted and jumped between metal surfaces, multicoloured and extremely hot. The sound of glass popping like water balloons filled her ears, the noise was getting too loud, even guided by J’onn she could barely think with the screaming in her ears—

There was a _bang_ , everything shuddered.

Then, they fell. Addy’s head slammed against the ceiling at first, doubly weightless, but before J’onn could drag her lower, away from the ceiling, they landed.

The ceiling shattered, and the ground lanced up to slam into her.

* * *

The noises were distant, muffled. Her head felt heavy and thick, she felt... pressurized, weighted. She couldn’t breathe, but then her solar energy replenished her body’s stores of oxygen anyway.

She couldn’t open her eyes, something was pressing down on them.

Someone said something, muffled, distant, far away. The pressure alleviated just a little, and then it did so again. The sounds grew clearer, metal scraping against metal, pulling and throwing and yelling and—

Addy heaved in a breath as a wide crack opened above her, letting in light and air. Koriand’r’s face stared down at her, fingers caught between the panels as she pried it off to one side, easing it away with a huff.

J’onn’s head glanced inside too, visibly relaxing when he saw she was okay.

A feral scream echoed from somewhere behind them, _Kara_ , her voice was loud. Enraged. Hateful. J’onn’s relief turned to panic, and wordlessly both himself and Koriand’r began to quickly strip the rubble away. Addy tugged on her arm, pulling, she had to get out, had to get to Kara, had to find a way—

A piece came loose. Addy kicked her flight into gear, wrenched her hand up, and exploded up out of the rubble.

The sun was high above her, beaming down. All around her was chaos, they were all but in the city, rubble from the destroyed Fort Rozz strewn around, half-buried into a building. A huge crowd of people stood a distance away, and in the dead center of the rubble, Clark pulled Kara away from Non, her fists bloody, yelling at her.

Non, on the ground, looked nearly dead.

Kara tried to free herself, wrenched and kicked and pulled but Clark dragged her in closer, tighter. He said something, pointed towards her. Kara’s head snapped around, followed his hand, and their eyes met.

Addy didn’t feel the need to look away for once.

Kara’s face split from rage to relief, desperate, utterly overwhelming relief. She pulled free of Clark’s grip, who the second she did went towards Non, grabbing hold of his limp body and rising into the air, pointedly ignoring the D.E.O. transport not too far away. Kara’s form was a blur, a streak, and it crashed bodily into her without any restraint, jarring some of the larger bruises Addy was starting to realize her body had begun to collect discouragingly regularly.

“You’re okay, oh _thank Rao_ ,” Kara babbled, arms tight to the point where her shoulders creaked beneath it. Weirdly, despite the slight pain, she was fine with it. “ _I was so worried Addy, we were about to take you in and they couldn’t find you. There was so much rubble, you weren’t communicating with anyone psychically, I thought you died_ —”

J’onn touched her shoulder, floating beside them, and helped ease the two of them down to the ground.

Addy, still feeling more than a little shell shocked, just let herself get hugged, listening to Kara’s repeated ‘thank Raos’, mumbled almost incoherently beneath her breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been trying to hint that something like this was going to happen (especially with what Addy did to J'onn) but er, hey, I hope it doesn't feel completely out of left field.
> 
> Anyway, thus fully ends the Myriad arc in its totality. Next is an interlude from multiple PoVs and stuff.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


	23. SEASON 1 - EPISODE 21 - INTERLUDE 3 [MULTI]

**[KARA]**

_The wait was always the hardest. Being unable to do things—forced to remain patient as the world progressed towards a worse future. It was one of the few things Kara couldn’t really stand, could barely tolerate the thought of, and yet here she was, floating hundreds of feet in the air alongside Kal, watching as Fort Rozz made its steady crawl closer and closer towards National City._

_“I don’t like this plan,” Kal said, voice quiet, but not attempting to keep it from her._

_Kara didn’t look away from the prison. Couldn’t, not when they were five minutes out from it arriving right on the city’s doorstep._

_She could feel Kal staring at her, taking in her silence._

_“It should’ve been one of us,” he said, unhindered or uncaring towards her silence. Towards her need for silence, lest she let her thoughts get away from her and push her to do something monumentally stupid. “We could’ve found a—”_

_“No, we couldn’t’ve,” Kara grit out, unable to help herself. “Rao only knows how Addy managed it in the first place.”_

_Not, of course, that she didn’t think J’onn should’ve accepted her help. That was an odd state of mind, to be fair, she was torn between wanting to let Addy do as much as she thought she could, to accept that Addy could make mistakes and shielding her from those would negatively impact her ability to adapt to living as a human, while also at the same time wanting to do absolutely everything in her power to do the opposite. Was this what parenting was like?_

_Not that Kara thought she was Addy’s mother or something—no, she was pretty sure Addy was significantly older than her and had, somehow, more baggage about her parents - if you could call what she had described as “The Warrior” and “The Thinker” that, which Kara still wasn’t completely sold on - than she did, and she’d watched every last member of her family die in a horrific ball of molten rock and flame when her planet exploded._

_No, the dynamic between herself and Addy was more like... sisters? She’d like to think so, anyway. Hopefully it wasn’t just one-sided, because that would be incredibly awkward and more than a little depressing—_

_“We could’ve tried to push it into space?” Kal tried weakly, thankfully breaking the spiral her thoughts had started to undergo._

_Kara sent a look his way. “And, what, after we survive the citadel-level anti-air batteries, which I’m not entirely sure we could, Kal, and we throw it into space, we just... float around up there? We might not need to breathe with access to sunlight, but unless you’ve forgotten we need to be in an atmosphere to fly.”_

_Kal’s face went a bit blotchy, red around the cheeks, mouth twisting into an embarrassed slant. Rao, had she actually raised him, actually arrived on time, this would’ve been a pretty normal back-and-forth for them, wouldn’t it? Kinda hard to imagine, now that Kal was a solid fifteen years her senior not counting her time spent in the Phantom Zone, and had been that way in her mind since the first week after she landed on Earth in the first place._

_“I do have a shuttle, we could’ve—”_

_Whatever he was about to say, about to offer in retrospect, was thoroughly interrupted by a loud screech. Kara whipped her head around, gaze catching on Fort Rozz as orange, glowing cracks began to ripple across the surface. The shield around it, only barely visible where the edge met air, flickered, dulled, and then vanished. The cracks grew brighter, the prison gave another unsteady lurch and then, finally, began to fall._

_Kara blitzed forward before she really even knew what she was doing, swooping down into a low curve. The orange cracks grew wider, larger, almost covering the entire outer surface of the prison, before, with an accompanying explosion that tore off a chunk of a ring, accompanied by a building-high plume of smoke and red-orange flame, almost all of it retreated, leaving behind small pockets, but nothing more._

_Arms outstretched, her palms met the surface of the prison and it halted. She less saw, more heard Kal do the same, body slamming into the steadily-drooping prison with a sharp bang, jarring her ears. She pushed at her flight, eyes narrowing as she started to feel the weight of it all, settling into her bones, her muscles, almost aching with it._

_Her fingers began to sink into the material, metal bending when it wouldn’t’ve before, before giving way entirely. The entire thing slipped up to forearms, and she could feel the odd mix of wiring and metal that made up its interior. Nothing was solid enough to support the weight anymore, the metal simply gave against her, beginning to crunch and tear as it sheathed more and more of her inside of it._

_It wasn’t working. The material wasn’t hard enough to support itself anymore. She wasn’t slowing the fall in any meaningful way, she was just causing more damage. Yanking hard, she ripped herself free before the metal could entomb her torso too, flying back a distance, catching sight of Kal doing much the same._

_Before she could call out to him, ask what they could even do - surely he would have more experience, surely he would know - all the lingering orange cracks erupted in brightness, growing in intensity until she had to shield her eyes. Just as quick, it all detonated, a staccato of pure-energy explosions ripping across the surface, propelling the chunks of Fort Rozz forward at five, six, seven times the speed it had been originally travelling, spiking it straight into the concrete and the highrise that defined the start of the city’s limits._

* * *

Kara had always had a bit of an odd relationship with the American government. For starters, back when she’d arrived, the very notion of the system the government operated under had been an utterly alien experience for her, almost unimaginable, delusional in her perspective. On Krypton, the various guilds had operated both as bureaucratic institutions for those working in various fields and as political organizations, though all working together as a unified whole. In a sense, Krypton had been a one-party system, though the implications the term ‘one-party system’ brought with it painted the wrong picture of politics on Krypton, to put it lightly.

There were all the _other_ problems she had, too. For starters, she was technically an illegal alien; a naturalized one, sure, but still significantly different from Kal, who had been effectively raised as a human. She was closer to an ex-pat in terms of carrying her culture with her, though she still preferred to think of herself as a refugee more than a foreign national.

Time and age hadn’t really made her relationship with the government any _better_ , either. The government had been the reason why Jeremiah had ‘died’ - or, well, it had been her fault for being caught flying, and he wasn’t dead, just probably being tortured at Cadmus, not that that was much better - and she had spent a not-insignificant amount of her teenage years watching various politicians fall over themselves to retroactively justify Lex Luthor’s attempts on her cousin’s life. There was a reason it had taken nearly thirty deaths - _human_ deaths, not alien ones, they probably wouldn’t count those - during one of Lex’s schemes to get him arrested and tried, and even then it had only been Lena Luthor - his estranged, adopted sister, as far as the internet knew - testifying against him which had really gotten him sentenced for life.

Between that and the genuinely _kinda_ hostile nature of some political parties and the fact that one entire political branch seemed to be dead set on turning back the wheel of progress, you could say that Kara’s opinions on the matter had always been somewhat _bleak_.

Which did, in fact, mean walking down the long stretch of hallway to the oval office with Addy at her side was an eminently surreal experience. Honest-to-Rao, the only time she’d expected to be in the White House was if she’d been outed as an alien and detained, that or if she had to save the president or something, though that had always been more Kal’s thing.

Aides watched them pass, sharing glances between them, murmuring quietly to one another. Kara, politely, kept her hearing stuck on Addy’s crystalline chiming, which right now, as far as she could tell, was indicating less _happiness_ and more _excitement_ , though she was still getting used to how various pitches and rhythms could mean different things when it came to Addy.

Speaking of, she passed her glance over to her. Addy was in costume - as was she - though hers had a different style to the one she’d been wearing during the Fort Rozz fight a few days back. This one had branch-like lines instead of circuitry, though it still came together at her chest to form a stylized ‘A’. Looking closer, actually, they resembled the designs she’d painted on Addy’s face with the oil, the ones around her forehead to be precise, though these didn’t seem to be fractals.

Under her good arm - not that it was easy to tell with a glance, Winn had really gone the extra mile with the fake; the only thing he could’ve done to make it more real-looking was if it was a prosthetic - Addy had tucked a notepad beneath it, pinching the material between her bicep and her ribs. On it, in surprisingly fluid and intricate lettering, was ‘THE CASE TO REHIRE J’ONN J’ONZZ’.

Addy had spent the last few days on it, basically the instant they’d arrived home. What exactly was in the notebook was anyone’s guess, Addy had been very strict on nobody seeing it, in all likelihood because it probably wasn’t something Kara would _totally_ agree to, but then at this point she was pretty sure so long as Addy didn’t openly threaten the president, she’d more than likely agree to rehire J’onn anyway.

And if it was just a collection of thinly-veiled threats, well, they’d deal with it, but she trusted that Addy wouldn’t do something like that without first asking for a second opinion on the matter.

Coming to a halt just at the doors leading into the oval office, Kara glanced up towards Addy’s face, caught her eye. They stared at one another for a moment, and Kara urged a smile to her lips, one of the ones she did when she was trying to reassure people.

It was, as with most of her expressions, surprisingly effective on Addy, who perked noticeably up at it.

Reaching forward, Kara knocked twice on the door.

* * *

**[ALEX]**

_It took time for the dust to clear, for the earth to stop shuddering like it was about to come apart. Even this high up, this far away, the sheer impact of something that large hitting the ground so hard was more than felt._

_“Agent Danvers, do you have eyes?”_

_Gritting her teeth against Sam Lane’s voice in her ear, Alex peered deeper into the scope of her rifle. He’d sidelined her for this, presumably due to her connection to Supergirl - not that he knew Kara was Supergirl or that she was Supergirl’s sister, thank god - and had equipped her with a rifle and told her to keep watch. Clearly, he hadn’t expected her to be actually useful if he was asking._

_Still, if anyone did get the first look into the post-crash state of things, it was definitely her. The dust cleared, and with it revealed the sheer totality of the destruction. Fort Rozz was in pieces, enough of them that there was no point in counting, and scattered most of the way down the street. A crowd of people lingered near the edge, having ignored evacuation calls, and were a good couple hundred all told, nothing but air stopping them from moving directly into the crash site._

_The crash site itself was smouldering, gouts of smoke towering out from the various chunks. One-by-one, aliens began to emerge, she spotted J’onn first, erupting out from a house-high pile of scrap in a flurry of red energy. Shortly following him was a woman, with dark skin that was closer to bronze than it wasn’t, who quickly flew up beside him, her eyes filling in with a bright, neon-green the longer her skin and frizzy ginger hair was exposed to light._

_Others began to shamble out, some wearing Kryptonian uniforms, others being a purple humanoid alien thing that Alex couldn’t really identify._

_“Agent Danvers. Report.”_

_Grimacing, Alex reached up, pressing her free hand into her earpiece. “I’ve got sight on J’onn and several unknowns, flying around. Others are emerging from the rubble, including some Kryptonians—” Her eyes caught something, swivelled to see Non slowly drawing himself free of the pile of debris, face twisted into sheer hate. “I have eyes on Non, sir.”_

_Or, at least she did, as in the next following seconds, Non turned, said something to Kara that she couldn’t hear, smiled wide and gleeful. In an instant, she lost sight of her sister, a streak of blue and red falling down from the sky and driving into Non with enough force to send another sympathetic quake through the environment, rubble thrown into the air and into clogging clouds of dust as she vanished into the wreckage, seemingly dragging Non through it, red lasers erupting from within the clouds every few seconds, passing off far into the distance._

_“Lost sight, sir,” Alex said, belatedly._

_“Then find it again, Agent!”_

* * *

Being back in Midvale was like being 17 again, and not in a good way. Back then, she’d been so desperate to escape the confines of the area that she’d moved to the other side of the continent - what with Midvale being a short trip out from Metropolis, New York state, and National City being in California - all for a science program that was neither particularly renown nor all that good, in hindsight.

Still, it wasn’t like Midvale had changed all that much in the years since. It still had the same rolling hills, the high school was still right next to the junior high, the one and only McDonalds across from those, and main street was still its little idyllic, mom-and-pop shop self. Hell, the penis one of her ex-boyfriends had scribbled on one of the stop signs was still there, in all of its sharpie glory.

Her rental crawled along the streets at a blistering 25 miles-per-hour, the suspension rattling unpleasantly over each pothole and speed bump. The car’s poor performance was in part because this was Midvale, and the only rental place was owned by a 40-year-old manchild by the name of Craig who couldn’t be trusted to take care of a rock, let alone an independent business, and in part because she had a week’s worth of clothing for three separate people in her trunk, and seeing as one of those people was _Addy_ , who required at least three options for each outfit, it was really no wonder that the car was struggling.

The trees were all stripped bare, still frost-hewn from the late winter that had apparently stuck around into mid-March. Pockets of icy snow clung to roadsides and at the foot of people’s front yards, half-melted but not yet quite willing to give up to the warmer temperatures, however few and far between the days where it got over 50 degrees might be. The dashboard claimed that it was a balmy 39 out, though considering she’d been outside, she was pretty sure the temperature was at least 10 degrees colder than 39.

That or it could just be the fact that she had lived in California for the majority of her adult life and she was as ill-suited for Midvale’s weather as she was mentally for being here in the first place. Who knows.

Easing her car off the main street and up onto the road she lived off, refusing to give in to the urge to wince as the car gave another unsteady lurch in retaliation, Alex eased her already street-race worthy speed down to the heady heights of an elderly woman on a stretch of highway, keeping to around 10 miles-per-hour.

A few things here, at least, had changed. Someone had bought Darcy’s house, a three-story tower of a house that’d been on sale since she was eleven, largely because it’d been one of the most expensive places in the town. Not that she could see the person who had, just that the ‘for sale’ sign had been removed from the front lawn and there was a nice-looking black SUV in the front driveway.

She could still remember stumbling through the backyard of that place as a shortcut to get down to the sea quicker, Kara chasing after her with wobbly steps and unsure footing, despite her ability to fly and general invulnerability. Admittedly, that sort of hesitant behaviour had worn off _real quick_ as her sister adapted to being the second hardest thing to put down for any length of time on the planet, but still, the memories were nice.

The shouting match she and her mother got into - _“how could you expose her to danger like that, Alex?! You should know better!_ ” - was a significantly less amusing memory, but then that was part-in-parcel for Midvale. She didn’t want to be back here, swimming in the mix of good and bad, to be reminded that she and her mother were on decent terms but that had only been after years of reconciliation and coming back here might just up and unravel everything anyway.

Tightening her grip on the wheel, Alex breathed out a sigh. She had to do what she had to do, and considering what she _was_ about to do, she’d know pretty early on if the visit was going to be a bust.

Slowing to a halt as she rolled into the driveway, Alex jerked the car into park, plucked the keys, and popped her door, stepping out onto the gravel. Easing it shut behind her, she tromped down towards the boot, reaching under and popping it with a press of her fingers, the trunk easing open with an unpleasant _squeak_.

“Alex.”

She turned, glanced at J’onn, already in his Hank Henshaw form, standing not too far away. “J’onn, I’m glad you could make it.”

He smiled warmly back at her, stepping forward. “Of course, we’re here to tell Eliza about Jeremiah—I couldn’t just leave that to you.”

He could’ve, was the thing. Alex was well and truly used to being the bearer of bad - or, well, not _bad_ news, not in this instance anyway - news for her mother. It was routine, and the fact that J’onn had agreed to go at all had come as something of a shock.

“Mind if I help you bring some of this in?”

Alex glanced back towards the trunk, grimacing. Four suitcases, two Addy’s, one Kara’s, one hers. “Take Addy’s?” She motioned towards the only two suitcases that weren’t black: one being canary-yellow - one of Addy’s favourite colours, Alex was starting to realize - and one a similar wine-red to that hat she liked so much.

“Agent Danvers,” J’onn said, faux-scoldingly, even as he reached to take them both. “Are you trying to get me to carry the heaviest ones, so you don’t have to?”

She felt herself relax a bit at the banter, possibly as intended. “Why, of course Director Henshaw,” she played along, taking her and Kara’s suitcases out one-by-one, before shutting and locking the emptied trunk. “Only one of us has super strength, and unless I recently developed a case of it, that would be you.”

Hefting Kara’s and her own suitcases up, Alex started the ponderous journey up the driveway, the sound of gravel crunching beneath each footfall she and J’onn made. She skipped the stairs on the porch, eased herself fully up to the door, and briefly let go of Kara’s suitcase to knock.

“Coming!” Mom’s voice came from somewhere deep inside.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stick around for Addy’s adoption thing?” Alex asked, glancing J’onn’s way. It was probably one of the only times she’d get to ask the question, if he wasn’t.

J’onn smiled, though it was a bit tight. “Unfortunately, until Addy’s plan to exonerate me of any wrongdoing comes into effect, I am currently being actively hunted by the agency I helped build. I can’t remain in any place for too long.”

Honest to god, Alex really hoped that Addy’s plan _did_ work out, largely because if it didn’t, she’d be stuck working under _General Lane_ , or god forbid Director Harper for the foreseeable future and she wasn’t entirely sure which brand of xenophobe would be worse.

The lock to the door clicked, twisted, and then the door itself pulled open. Mom was there, blonde as ever, with a few more wrinkles than Alex remembered her having last Christmas. Mom’s eyes went from her, to J’onn. “Alex? And—you. How dare you come back here?!”

“Mom,” she interrupted, cutting through the din of outrage. “This isn’t the man who took Dad away.”

Mom’s face twisted a bit at the words, not unexpectedly. “The man who got your father _killed_ , you mean.”

J’onn shook his head. “You’re wrong on both accounts,” he explained, skin rippling with red motes, shifting from the dark brown of Hank’s form to the green he was in his Martian form, if just without taking on the shape of it. Mom visibly jolted at it, staring confusedly at J’onn. “I am not Hank Henshaw, I took his identity, your husband saved me, Eliza Danvers. That he is dead, too, is wrong, your husband—he did not die that day in Peru.”

Mom stared, eyes wide and confused, but distantly hopeful. “What?”

“Mom, Dad’s alive,” she said, drawing Mom’s focus back to her, just for the moment. “He’s being kept at Cadmus, as a prisoner, J’onn saw as much in the memories of one of their agents, when we broke him out.”

For a moment, Mom did nothing, just stared at the two of them. “Where’s Kara and Addy?” she said, at last, and Alex couldn’t help the little noise of relief she let out when Mom didn’t push on _how_ J’onn read someone’s memories. Oh, they’d probably have to have a discussion about it, but now was _sincerely_ not the time for it.

“Washington,” Alex supplied easily. “Kara had to fly Addy over—this is her second head injury in a week, and her third in a little under a month. I grounded her, just to be safe. They should arrive at around the same time Clark will.”

Mom opened her mouth again, then shut it. Finally, she stepped back, and motioned them through. “No use in talking about it in public. Come in, we clearly have a lot to discuss.”

Sharing another glance with J’onn, Alex took in a breath, banished the erstwhile memories of her childhood, and stepped into the home she grew up in.

* * *

**[MAXWELL]**

_Lex, back before Maxwell had more officially pulled away from him and his obsession with Superman, had once told him that it was not so much that he feared the world ending, but rather he feared_ how _the world might end. It had been an excruciatingly personal moment between the two of them, Lex rarely if ever let down his guard or his walls, built up by years of slipshod direction by Lillian - his mother - and the ebbing legacy of his father. Lex was not supposed to show weakness, but he had, in that moment._

_“I fear the world might end not with a last stand, not with the messy politics of humans, but rather quietly, suddenly, and without warning, as a result of something extra-terrestrial, something unfathomable,” he had said, eyes hazy, a few fingers of scotch swirling around in one of those fancy, unreasonably expensive glass cups he owned. It hadn’t been long after Superman had made his first appearance, had plucked a plane out of the sky._

_It had been the start of the end, looking back on it._

_But, honestly, Maxwell could to a point see where Lex was coming from._

_Fort Rozz’s rubble stretched out across an area about twice the size of the biggest stadium in the city, a mess of mangled metal corridors and unknowable tech. Dust floated thick in the air, forming an unnatural smog, fed further by smoke that billowed up and out from open fissures in some of the more ruined pieces. Where there had once been dry, grassy fields, giving way to concrete and the beginnings of civilization, there was now little more than a wasteland._

_No, in a way, Lex had been right. That fear was justifiably real, if a bit misguided. He had feared Superman, what Superman could be if he was anything but the perfect person he acted like. If Superman had faults, even minuscule ones, wholly human faults we accept and forgive in anyone else, the end results could be catastrophic, and for a boy who had been raised to view everyone with a mixture of suspicion and thinly-veiled classist disinterest, it was likely unfathomable that someone with that amount of power could just want to help._

_What he had gotten wrong was that there was no real getting rid of them, not after they’re here. The logistics of it aside, what research Maxwell had put into the topic had painted a more broad picture of alien life on Earth. It was, for starters, not restricted to America; quite the contrary, really, the aliens in America were either there because they couldn’t leave it, or because they wanted to do something in America. The rest of the world had larger communities, secretive, yes, but they had been around for a long, long time._

_Lex had been looking at the problem wrong, he’d been looking at Superman as though if he just removed him, the aliens would go with him. Perhaps, in theory, aliens might retreat from public view, and the Superman-related supervillains which occasionally popped up - Reactron, as an example - might settle down, but then that was unrealistic, wasn’t it? These people had unimaginable powers or tech, why would they just sit on it now that the one thing preventing them from using it to claim chunks of territory was gone?_

_No, to Lex, Superman had been both the start and the end of the alien conversation. If you got rid of him, he had reasoned, you would get rid of everything in between those two points as well._

_Maxwell had learned better._

_Adjusting the flight of his two drones, he tracked the movement of Supergirl to the best of his abilities. He could hear her, through the tinny microphones embedded into the chassis, a sharp cry of anger and crunching metal, of flesh meeting flesh with enough force to sound like a continent-sized lamb-skin drum._

_The two drones he had, they were his last. He’d decommissioned the rest of the military-grade tech he’d been developing, had it stripped down for parts before the military could act on their promise to collect most of it. Oh, General Lane had not been a happy camper, coming into one of his warehouses only to find it devoid of anything with more stopping power than a fat guppy, and had spent the better part of an hour screaming his ear off over the phone, but the decision to do so had settled something inside of him._

_No more weapons, no more conflict, just... getting back to his roots, getting back to where he had been before Lex had become a major part of his life and had thereafter been unflinchingly torn out of it by the consequences of his own actions. Before he’d let himself give in to the rhetoric that had plagued his thoughts since Supergirl had arrived, since the first inkling of doubt, of ‘will what happened to Metropolis happen to my city?’ had crawled into his head from whatever gloomy pit it had originated from._

_He would not be so stupid to call himself a truly changed man, not quite. Healthy suspicion in godlike aliens was, in his personal opinion, a pretty valid stance, but at least this time he wouldn’t be spending nights awake trying to find a way to blow Supergirl’s head off._

_Supergirl emerged from the cloud of dust in a burst, the force of her flight blasting the smoke and dust away. In one hand, she gripped Non by the front of his uniform, his head lolled back, blood leaking from his nose, his mouth, but his eyes were aware, awake, and more than a little gleeful._

_“You should have known it was a suicide mission,” Non garbled out, Max quietly adjusting the intensity of the microphone to give himself a bit more clarity. “Omegahedrons don’t just overload, my niece, whoever was sent to sabotage my ship has likely been torn apart on a moll—”_

_Whatever he was about to say was buried beneath another punch to the face, the resulting clap of force the blow carried being enough to jar one of his drones slightly. Non’s head jerked back, blood catching on his lower lip, nearly frothing._

_Supergirl’s eyes were cold, dark, and completely broken._

_It felt really awful empathizing with Supergirl, but that was a look he knew, had seen in himself as a child. The haunted look of a family member gone._

_Non had meant Addy, in that case, hadn’t he?_

_Empathy turned to an ache in his chest. Maxwell stomped down on it with the same practiced ease he had used for the bone-aching grief he’d experienced when his own parents had died. He had no right to put a claim to grief over Addy; despite his brain making some... unique connections between himself and the girl in question, she was not his daughter, regardless of how much of he might’ve played a part in her creation._

_He knew that. It still hurt, but then most things in life did, at least for him._

_Maxwell leaned back into his chair, the vast emptiness of his warehouse surrounding him. The silence was deafening, that low ringing-in-your-ears sort of sound, his mind filling in the silence when it wouldn’t abate. On one screen, Supergirl lowered herself and Non towards the ruined ground, her face set into a broken mask, and on the other, Superman rushed towards her, panic writ across his face, likely fearing the worst. He couldn’t blame him, really, it was anyone’s guess if Kara would outright murder Non or not, and worst of all, part of him wanted her to._

_He wasn’t even sure if it was because it would mean one less Kryptonian, or if it was because it might mean something to Addy’s legacy, if she even got one._

* * *

Luthor Corp - or, well, it was L-Corp now, wasn’t it? - didn’t look any different to how it had in the years' Lex had run it, which was something of a surprise, considering Lena’s decision to move the headquarters to National City. The building was just as active as it always was, showed no sign of people packing up, preparing for a move, nor did anyone look like they were worried about their future careers.

The only different thing was the secretary, not that Maxwell considered that a bad thing.

Jess Hoang, or so her nameplate on her desk said, stared at him like he was a scourge. He’d always had something of a soft spot for personal assistants who didn’t play around, who were very obvious about their thoughts on other people, instead of letting themselves get pushed around. Her desk was, as had been with every other secretary before her, tucked just to the side of the door leading into the CEO’s office.

“I, ah, believe I have a meeting with Ms. Luthor?” Maxwell said, trying to keep his tone appeasing. Better to not play chicken with the sole person who could get him what he wanted, and all that.

Jess responded to his softness with the sort of glare generally reserved for in-laws and pedophiles, like he was the gritty dirt beneath the heel of a boot.

Maxwell shifted in place, hiking the manilla folder up further beneath his armpit, trying not to let the discomfort show. He was, despite everything, not used to getting looks like that. Those looks had been shot towards him by a select few—Supergirl, Adeline, Agent Danvers in one instance. Most people did genuinely like him, and he liked most people.

Finally turning her gaze away - and it took more than a little effort not to let the sigh of relief slip out between his lips, embarrassingly enough - Jess plucked the corded phone from the receiver - surprisingly low-tech for Luthor Corp - and dialled a few numbers, tucking it between her ear and her shoulder. “Miss Luthor?”

Silence.

“Your 1:45 is here—Maxwell Lord, yes.”

Couldn’t she say his name with a little less vitriol? Honestly, it had been amusing at the start but now he was genuinely concerned he’d personally slighted her in some way. He’d have to look into it.

Jess placing the phone back down jarred him back into focus, the loud plasticky _click-clack_ of it settling into position ringing in his ears. “You may enter,” she supplied flatly, though her gaze carried a ‘ _and if you abuse that privilege, I will gut you_ ’ that he was really not appreciative of.

Pushing those concerns to the back of his head, Maxwell steadied the folder beneath his arm for the second time and approached the frosted-glass door that separated him from Lena Luthor. He reached down, took the knob into hand, and twisted, pushing it open.

Seeing the office after all these years was a shock. Lex had designed it very specifically to show off his wealth and technology, and Lena had seemed to have done the opposite. The office was barebones, little more than a few unfamiliar couches, a desk, and a series of huge filing cabinets behind the leather chair tucked into the desk. The view was still the same, floor-to-ceiling windows completely covering the left wall, showing Metropolis far below, forever bustling.

Lena herself had changed in the time since he’d last seen her, though that was to be expected—the last time he’d seen her had been when she was fourteen-going-on-fifteen. She still had that long, straight dark-brown hair that reached well past her shoulders, that same commitment to cherry-red lipstick, and those painfully bright green eyes. Her features were sharp, high cheekbones, a jaw that you could cut your finger on, and a more rounded chin. Her skin was pale and without blemishes, an Irish complexion that would likely burn before it could tan.

For a moment, they just stared at one another, before, finally—

“Maxwell,” Lena drawled.

Maxwell stepped in, eased the glass door shut behind him as he approached the desk and the two chairs seated in front of it. “Lena, it has been a while.”

“About ten years,” she agreed tonelessly. “Now, what can I do for you? Considering you took the time to fly out to Metropolis when we’ll be moving to National City in under a month, it must be important.”

As important as anything could be, in this day and age, he supposed. Pulling out a chair, Maxwell dropped the folder down on the desk before easing himself into it with a sigh, the creak in his lower back still acting up, even long after he’d been freed from sleeping on a concrete slab. “I want you to hire someone,” he said, getting straight to the point.

Lena’s eyes narrowed down to slits. “You know,” she began, folding one hand beneath her chin. “I heard about you ‘following our example’, Maxwell—getting out of the arms business, war profiteering, and I was excited to see that maybe we had set a trend, but let me make something perfectly clear. I am not my brother, and if you’re here to break your own word to the public and try to get me on board with weapon’s manufacturing, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Ah. There was the Lena he knew: no trust for the common man, and with a bitter streak a mile wide. They’d never actually gotten along, only remaining cordial because it would upset Lex otherwise, but now, he supposed, with the man himself in prison for the rest of his life, there was no point in keeping up the charade.

“I’m not breaking my word,” he rebuked rather flatly, watching the way Lena’s eyes shifted minutely, widened ever-so-little. “I know part of what you’ll be doing in the near future is handling the research rights for all the alien tech they keep fishing out of the wreckage where an alien prison used to be. I know you’ve sworn off making weapons out of it, and I know for a fact that you, and most other companies operating in or out of National City, need high-end researchers, or number-crunchers, physicists, anyone or thing that can make heads or tails of the things that’ll soon be handed off to you.”

Reaching forward, he eased the front page of the manilla folder open, gently pushed it in Lena’s direction. She took the top few pages, the abbreviated, censored alien-knowledge-level test that Addy had taken and he had managed to lift from the D.E.O. databases during a fit of pique not too long ago. It looked, by all accounts, like an assessment, and gave nothing away about her heritage; he might know that Lena was different from her brother, but he didn’t trust her not to respond negatively to Addy’s status.

He let her read, watched her eyes flick up and down the page, watched her carefully fold it over one-by-one, going over the answers, the notes from the team of scientists who assessed her.

“Why?” She said, finally, still reading.

Maxwell breathed out, a laboured sigh. “She’s working as a junior IT-tech for CatCo right now,” he said plainly. “She isn’t suited to be there, she could do so much more, but she’s... content, and she isn’t exactly getting other job opportunities.”

“If what’s on this is even remotely true, Adeline Queen is on par with some of the greatest minds of our generation,” Lena cut back dryly, sounding unimpressed. “How on earth hasn’t she been scouted? Why don’t I know about her? Why do _you_?”

It was more than just the fact that Addy was working in a field that she didn’t really fit. No, that was actually a very _minor_ reason. His true focus was on the fact that he didn’t entirely trust Addy’s ability to remain out of the spotlight in a multimedia company, that and a healthy fear of mind-controlling aliens having access to the inner workings of said multimedia company.

“I have a vested interest in her future,” Maxwell said, instead.

Lena’s eyes narrowed, never one to give something like that a pass. “Maxwell, what would you say your relationship with this woman is?”

Ah. Quicker on the uptake than he liked her to be. “I played a part in her creation.”

Eyebrows rose, and Lena gave him a look so _viscerally_ Lex Luthor, the Lex before Superman, the Lex who would slyly raise an eyebrow to bring an entire conversation tumbling down, that he nearly flinched.

Lena seemed to catch it, and her face quickly switched back to neutral. “If everything here is true - which is hard to believe, considering there’s no record of a formal education in any of the fields she seems to well-versed in - I can’t see why I wouldn’t be willing to hire her, though I am not one for nepotism, however rich that might be coming from the Luthor heiress.”

Maxwell smiled, wan and tired but at least he knew this much. “You and I both know you’d rather be working in a lab, Lena.”

The woman in question deflated a bit, humming a thoughtful tone. “Quite. Still, if you’re certain about this, I would be willing to extend an offer to buy her job out and hire her as a researcher.”

“I only have a few requirements,” he replied, bringing up a hand to forestall the response Lena was no doubt about to bite his way. “For one, she can’t know it was me who brought this to you.”

Lena blinked. “Why?”

“She hates me,” he replied matter-of-factly and utterly truthfully. “We’re... very much estranged.”

“Doesn’t take much after you?” Lena hedged, in return.

Maxwell couldn’t help the bark of laughter, however affronted. “No, _god_ no. She takes after the other half of the equation, here, much more than she ever did me.” Begrudgingly, he could admit that Kara seemed to be a good influence on her, if only because he knew just how bad she could be when she wasn’t restrained by conventional morals. The memory of her scraping telepathic fingers through his mind, dredging memories to the surface, was in equal parts terrifying and utterly disquieting. “Which is a good thing.”

Lena said nothing, only letting out a low hum.

“Second,” he continued, plucking a few pages out from the bottom of the pile, the Red Tornado-inspired prosthetic he had been drafting ever since he’d gotten access to the arm in the first place. “I want you to make one of these for her, and send it anonymously. The specifications of her arm size are in the rest of these files.”

Lena took the files, setting Addy’s assessment down before bringing it up to read again.

“Now, to be clear, you accepting the dual project between Lord Tech and L-Corp is not a prerequisite for hiring Addy. I want this to get out there, it’s good tech, leagues ahead of the norm.” In large part because, as far as he could tell, Red Tornado had been built half out of tech inspired _by_ salvaged alien technology. “We can go through with the plan to work on the project together, presumably with one of our teams, independently from Addy’s status. All I ask is that, if or when it’s finished, she gets the first one.”

Lena blinked, long and slow, like she was struggling to believe any of this. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise him if she was. “You care about her a lot,” she said, a bit dimly. Probably thinking about Lex.

Still, there was only one way to respond to that. Maxwell lolled his head back, stared up at the ceiling, and breathed out a noisy sigh. “I honestly wish I didn’t, things would be so much easier.”

Somewhere in front of him, Lena snorted.

“Yeah, it always would be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is out early because I had the time to do so. We'll be taking a middling break, at most 2 weeks, while I finish up plans for season 2.
> 
> Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed the little looks into how Addy is impacting other people's lives and what ya'll missed from Addy's PoV during the Fort Rozz fight. Here's to a more cohesive season 2!


	24. SEASON 1.5 - INTERMISSION 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy takes public transport, despite her better wishes.

Addy understood, rationally, that there were certain logistical concerns when it came to handling a secret identity.

Despite this, she would have sincerely preferred any other option than ‘public transport’.

The bus beneath the soles of her shoes lurched and rattled, bouncing against every minute blemish along the long stretch of paved road. The interior of the bus itself was old, bringing forward snapshot recollections of photographs of busses in the 1950s; heavy, utilitarian things with a mechanical system of rotating panels to show what stop was next. The seats were all made out of metal and what looked like linen, the ground was straightforwardly polished metal, and the entire thing smelt vaguely of diesel. What might’ve once passed for a suspension system back before the advent of modern seatbelts and airbags now proved to be an unpleasantly stiff thing, causing the entire bus to creak and rock whenever it had to sustain an elevation change more dramatic than a slight slope.

Clearly, public transport had not been Midvale’s primary concern when it came to getting around. Or, really, at all.

“It’s so good to see you back, Kara,” an elderly woman, stuffed primly into one of the wall-aligned seats, said, all smiles. Across from her, in an equally-uncomfortable looking seat, Kara smiled. She had gone from her costume to a pair of jeans, heavy brown boots, a flannel button-up shirt and a puffy winter jacket thrown over it all. It wasn’t a style of dress Addy had seen Kara wear before, but she thought it suitable, especially considering the location. “Coming to see Eliza, yes?”

The windows behind Kara’s head showed the long, winding roads of Midvale in perfect clarity. The day was murky, wind whipping and screaming between barren, winter-stripped branches of long, crooked trees. The ground was a mottled brown, grass withered and untended to, clumps torn away to reveal splotches of cold, muddy earth. The streets were mostly scarce, with an occasional weather-beaten vehicle chortling past them, wheels hopping along a road with more potholes than it had actual concrete. Some houses still had dirt-stained piles of snow down near the curb, though not many.

Kara laughed brightly, a fond smile stretching over her features. “Yeah—um, well. We’re mainly here to see Eliza, though the rest of my extended family should be coming around.”

Of course, all of this could’ve been circumvented had Kara allowed her to fly. Apparently, three instances of head trauma in such a small amount of time meant she wasn’t allowed to fly, even if her diagnostics pointed towards her being perfectly healed. She wasn’t frustrated about it, nor about the fact that they’d had to fly low and land on the outskirts of town, find an abandoned barn, change out of their costumes and into civilian clothes, before again walking the thirty minutes from said farm to the bus terminal on the edge of the town.

Not at all. She didn’t _get_ frustrated.

Just very, very annoyed.

The elderly woman, the only other occupant on the bus beside herself, the bus driver and Kara, nodded wisely, head bobbing. “She could do with some company, she’s getting long in the tooth. I’ll bet I can get her to join the local community kitchen, in another few years.” For whatever reason, the woman sighed, sounding almost fond, one dusky-brown hand coming up to palm at the wrinkles around her right cheek. Her hair, black and frizzy, had been pulled back into a ponytail, somewhat exaggerating how high her thin black eyebrows could be. It was quite the sight, honestly. “Oh! Speaking of, dear. Did you hear I finally managed to sell the house?”

For reasons utterly beyond Addy, Kara gawped at the elderly woman.

“Wait, seriously? Darcy, that’s great!” Kara was nearly vibrating out of her seat, now that Addy spared a closer inspection. “It’s—I was always worried you’d have to keep that lot. It’s probably not a great place for you, considering how your husband died on the steps.”

Darcy - apparently - rolled her shoulders in a shrug. “Yes,” she said, sounding non-committal. “It was a shame. I haven’t been able to look at the gun since.”

She was clearly missing something here, especially considering what she assumed the context was.

“I still can’t believe you never managed to get the company to pay out. It misfired, we all heard it.” Despite everything, Kara was nodding along, face twisted up in sympathy. Really, reflecting back on it, Addy was pretty certain Kara trusted too easily, or too much, in any event.

That or maybe _she_ was being overly suspicious.

Doubtful, but Kara had encouraged her to consider wildly outlandish notions in the past, and she wasn’t about to go against what she thought was worthwhile for her wellbeing. Even if she had, it certainly wouldn’t be this rule, and they would’ve already flown to Midvale by now.

“Yes, well.” Darcy let out a put-upon sigh, glancing Addy’s way, brow raised as if to imply she knew what she was thinking, and was eager to challenge her to bring any of it up. It wasn’t quite eye-contact - Darcy had tried that once and then never again after Addy had glanced away, unlike the bulk majority of people - but it was a very clear message. “May the devil rest his soul.”

There was a pause.

“Darcy? I uh, I’m pretty sure it’s _may God rest his soul_?”

Still not looking away from her, Darcy pressed a hand to her chest. “Quite, you’ll have to forgive me. I forget some things in my old age.” Then, finally, Darcy glanced away, back towards Kara, her face slipping back into that elderly-grandmother-neutral, as Addy had come to call it. “Speaking of, since you’re coming over, will Alex be as well?”

Kara nodded rapidly. “Yeah, Alex arrived already with our luggage. We got, um, _sidetracked_.”

Presidential meetings could technically qualify as being sidetracked, Addy supposed. A bit of a liberal interpretation, especially considering the visit to the woman was scheduled in the first place. It was better than the bulk majority of Kara’s lies, to be perfectly fair, so she’d allow it.

“Heavens, I can only imagine,” Darcy agreed, glancing away towards the streets, where the wind still bracketed against the trees, bending them with each new gust. “It’s rather nasty out there.”

Kara jolted, startled. “Oh!—uhm, yeah, totally! Totally, we uhm. Got sidetracked, by, uh—a... gust of wind! That—”

“Caused a car crash,” Addy interrupted, sincerely unable to take it anymore. She was going to have to teach Kara how to lie sometime soon. Very soon. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks. This was a crisis just waiting to happen. “The roads were icy,” she further supplied aptly.

Darcy nodded wisely, opened her mouth—

The bus creaked, its ‘next stop’ indicator ringing out like the electric bell of a school. Less of a ringing, more of a vibration that made all the metal creak in a way that would’ve been intimidating, had she not just been crushed by a spaceship in the recent past with only minor wounds to call for it.

Kara scrambled to her feet without preamble, looking a touch panicked and frazzled. “That’s our stop! Sorry, Darcy!” The words were coming out a rush, dangerously close to a babble. “Ads, _c’mon!_ ”

Obligingly, Addy pried her fingers from the metal bar she’d latched herself onto - because she _surely_ wasn’t about to sit on something as uncomfortable and ugly as a metal chair with black linen over it - and started forward. The bus began to list to the side, pulling up towards the curb, where a bus shelter stood out against the muddy brown grass, coloured an obnoxious neon-green.

“Give my well-wishes to Alex! You two girls be good to Eliza, you hear?”

Kara eased the doors open a little before the bus had pulled to a full stop, whipping her head around to peek over her shoulder. “Sure thing, Darcy!” Her eyes snapped around, and with an urgency that Addy thought was, frankly, unnecessary, she motioned for Addy to follow.

* * *

Addy sniffed. “We could’ve made it here earlier had you let me fly.”

It had taken them close to another fifteen minutes to finally reach the part of Midvale where Kara's adoptive mother lived, and all of it had been done on foot, to her own utter annoyance. Kara had refused every single attempt to speed the process up with powers, and at this point Addy was resorting to debating to prove her point. It was the oddest feeling, to be honest; she had stopped caring about the efficiency of flying to the house and had since become more fixated on proving that she was right.

Which she was. Very, very right.

Kara glanced back at her, blonde hair already pulled back into a ponytail, with glasses stuck on the bridge of her nose. “Ads,” she said with something that sounded an awful lot like exasperation, but couldn’t be, considering Addy was objectively correct about all of this. “You’ve had more concussions in the last three months than I have in my entire life.”

“I’m not sure how that’s relevant,” Addy said, keeping pace just behind Kara. “I heal very quickly.”

“You heal very quickly _in theory_ ,” Kara pointed out stubbornly, hands tucking themselves into her jacket.

Addy still felt a burst of exasperation come over her. She was _not_ about to be kept on the ground for an entire _week_ because Kara refused to believe her. “I have run several diagnostic tests on my body,” she announced firmly, ignoring the odd look a passing elderly man sent them, that and Kara’s inelegant shushing. She would not be silenced, this was her _right_. “I am in perfectly workable condition.”

“You’ve lost memories,” Kara said, not looking at her anymore and instead sending her gaze up towards the top of the street they were travelling along. The street was on a hill, or more of a cliff, really, the road stretching up along it, flanked by expensive-looking houses on each side. The earth gave way at certain points, with the lower elevations transitioning smoothly into sand and then ocean, but the higher one went, the more of a cliff the end of the terrain became. At the very top, in a house about three stories tall and more than sufficiently wide, was their destination: Eliza’s place, and Kara’s childhood home. “Who’s to say your, er”—she pitched her voice low for this, throwing her head back over her shoulder, brows wrinkled—“ _diagnostics_ weren’t hurt too?”

She was, matter of fact. She said her diagnostic systems weren’t damaged because the very notion was inaccurate and dumb. Dumb like the way _James_ got sometimes dumb. Addy tried to convey as much without words and only with her expression, not really in the mood for telling Kara how very stupid that concept was, and apparently she got something across, as Kara threw her hands up in what was clearly a display of surrender before turning fully back to the road.

“Huh,” Kara said, somewhat absently, her head turned to one of the houses closest to the top of the hill. “I wonder who lives in Darcy’s place, now?”

Addy followed her gaze, coming upon another three-story house that was built more like a tower than an actual home. In the driveway was a black SUV tucked in front of its garage, and all the windows had pitch-black blinds in them, contrasting rather harshly against the pristine white of its siding and roof. “Is it important?” Addy found herself asking without much better to do.

Kara half-shrugged, a bit limp, as they passed over the stretch of sidewalk just in front of the house in question. “It’s an expensive place, been on sale ever since I could remember.” Her words paused, even if her walking pace didn’t. “But I think it didn’t sell mostly because Darcy’s husband, well, shot himself on accident and bled out on the steps. Most people were scared off because they thought it was haunted, so it just depends on the type of person I guess.”

Addy blinked, dragging her gaze away from the house, suddenly just needing to know. “Are ghosts real?” She hadn’t had the need to check until now.

“Prety sure they’re not,” Kara said easily, tucking both hands behind her head as they started the steady crawl up the last remaining portion of the hill. “But some people believe they are.”

Addy was pretty sure those people were delusional. If ghosts had existed, she would know about it by now. Of course, she didn’t entirely understand how this dimension worked _just_ yet - but she was getting there - and would still have to recompile her data storage to properly integrate the freshly-obtained knowledge, but she would’ve noticed by now if this dimension had made room for something like magic or consciousnesses which could operate independently from a source.

Probably.

At least above ninety-percent chance, in any event. Her kin had worked with worse odds when it came to avenues for possible reality-breaking tricks, she could tolerate a variable percentage ranging from zero-point-one to ten percent.

Sidewalk transitioned from concrete to gravel, crunchy and delightful beneath the heel of her shoes. A car was parked off to the side, and the distance between the two of them and the door grew ever-smaller. She did wonder what Eliza would be like; she’d heard things about her, stories and anecdotes, but Kara had never been too forthcoming about her, nor had Alex. Her existence, other than ‘nice’ and ‘good at cooking’ was an utter enigma. She didn’t even know what she looked like, though going by Alex’s genetics, she was expecting an average-height woman with brownish-red hair and severe features.

Kara clambered up the steps to the porch of the house, Addy following after her, pausing only to reach out and rap her knuckles against the door. Inside, someone started walking towards the door, and Kara moved a little to the side, giving Addy just enough space to squeeze in between her and the wooden banister.

There was the sound of squeaking hinges as someone pulled something open, then the _clunk_ of a lock as they undid the protections for the door and pulled it open. Standing on the threshold of the house, with a screen door and wooden door pulled to the side, was an average-height woman, but that was where Addy’s predictions very firmly began to fail. She was older, at least in her mid-50s, with pale skin and narrow features, lacking the sharp cheekbones that Alex had. Her hair was more like Kara’s than it was Alex’s, despite the lack of actual genetic relation; a honey-wheat blonde that fell in tangly waves past her shoulders. She was wearing a simple white blouse tucked into waist-high jeans, with socked feet slipped into a pair of frizzy bunny-shaped slippers.

Addy approved of that last point. They looked nice to touch, she wanted to comb her fingers through the fabric, but knew better than to do that. That’d be impolite.

Kara leaned forward, stepping past and wrapping the woman up in a hug. The woman, just as comfortably, returned it. “It’s good to see you, Eliza.”

Eliza, apparently, tightened her hug around Kara before breaking free, a smile etched across her features. “You as well, Kara.” She glanced away from Kara, towards her, where her eyes lingered on her face. “I’m assuming this is Addy?”

“Uh—yup!” Kara blustered, fumbling, reaching up to push her glasses back up her nose. “Addy Queen, I know you’ve wanted to meet her for a while.”

Eliza stepped forward again, into Addy’s space, but not quite invading it. Her hands reached out, stopping just shy of actually coming into contact with her shoulders. She could feel the heat radiating from her palms, and felt oddly warm in her chest at the gesture. It was thoughtful in a way only really Kara tended to be, and she was starting to wonder if it had come from this woman rather than from Kara’s past on Krypton. Still, today she was okay with people touching her, so she leaned into it, let the palms of another person come to rest against her jacket.

“It’s good to meet you,” Addy said, rather simply. “Sorry for the delay. Kara refused to let me fly.”

Kara made a muffled noise of complaint somewhere to her left, out of sight.

“I heard about that,” Eliza said, rather confidently. “Three concussions in such a short amount of time isn’t good for you. I agree with her decision.” Her eyes drifted after that, glanced towards her stump. “That and considering you have signs that you can’t heal from everything, we can never be too safe. Do not begrudge her for her protectiveness, okay? She's just looking out for you.”

Addy blinked. “I don’t begrudge Kara for her protectiveness,” she announced primly. “I just think she is wrong.”

Despite not intending for it to be comedic, Eliza let out a bark of startled laughter that seemed to come almost unwillingly. Kara made another noise, this one a long, deep groan of something that sounded rather close to shame.

“Did I—” Addy fumbled, still not quite used to being left out of the context of the conversation. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Oh, heavens no,” Eliza breathed, warm hands retreating from her shoulders to wipe daintily at her eyes. “You just said, almost word-for-word, what Kara said as a child whenever we would set rules for her own safety.”

Oh. Okay. “She sounded like a very smart child.”

That got another laugh, more subdued and restrained, but still a laugh. “Sometimes too much for her own good,” Eliza agreed.

Addy wasn’t particularly sure how a person could be _too smart_ , all things considered, but figured it was probably best not to comment on the philosophical problems that statement created.

Eliza stepped back, motioning them through. “Now, come in, it’s still cold enough out to be nippy.”

Obligingly, Addy followed in after Kara, if only because she knew humans were, despite their capacity for adaptation and creativity, rather poor when it came to being uncomfortable. Taylor used to complain incessantly about bad weather, and though it was mostly due to the damage it did to the local insect population, she still complained a lot in her head about it.

Arriving in the entryway, Addy toed her shoes off while Kara squatted down to unlace and pry her boots off inefficiently. Glancing around, she couldn’t see hide nor hair of the luggage Alex had promised to bring over, nor the woman in question.

“Your stuff should be upstairs, in the guest bedroom,” Kara said, meeting her eyes from down below. Addy averted her gaze away, not quite able to hold it. She drummed her fingers against her side, if only to direct the energy somewhere. “I’ll show you up there in a sec. Speaking of, where’s Alex?”

“In the living room,” Eliza said, shuffling past them and down the hallway, towards what looked like a kitchen. “Getting drunk, I imagine.”

Kara said nothing, though her face was a bit awkward, cramped between frustration and annoyance but Addy couldn’t really ascertain to _whom_. Still, with a huff, she managed to get her boots the rest of the way off, revealing her socked feet, and picked both her boots up and Addy’s shoes, tucking them away in the small, narrow closet just off to the right of the front door. Closing the door to the closet, Kara rose up to her full height, no longer requiring Addy to crane her neck so far down that it almost hurt, and started off down the hallway after Eliza, Addy trailing after.

The hallway gave after about ten feet, opening up into a wide space. To her right was the kitchen, separated from the hallway by a chest-high wall, with tiled floors and a motley of appliances scattered across the countertops. To her left was the living room, with polished hardwood floors, tall windows mostly covered up by drapes, a few couches, a single television, and Alex herself. Alex was less sitting, more splayed out on the couch, one leg thrown over an ottoman while the other was curled up on the actual seat of the couch itself. In one hand, she held a remote, in the other a bottle of beer. On the table next to her, two other bottles had already been emptied.

“ _Mayor Collins has raised some concerns about alien technology ending up in the hands of gangs_ ,” a voice droned, a newscaster on the television sitting beside a small window. Below her, sliding across the screen, was ‘National City: the cleanup still continues’. “ _Two incidents of violence with alien technology have taken place over the last week_ —”

The channel switched to an infomercial for some sort of highly absorbent sponge.

“Don’t worry too much about it,” Alex said without looking at either of them, pausing to take another sip from her beer bottle. Addy wrinkled her nose, already smelling it. “The D.E.O.’s out there, doing their thing. National City can survive without you for a few days.”

Kara sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I know, and Sam Lane sure won’t give up the chance to arrest someone with alien tech.” She didn’t sound particularly enthused about the notion, though. “But, seriously Alex? It’s like two in the afternoon and you’re three bottles deep?”

Alex glanced away from the television, her face twisting a bit up like she’d tasted something sour. At a closer inspection, there were bags under her eyes and she looked a bit drawn-out. “If you don’t want me and Mom at our throats all day...”

“Why?” Kara pressed, frowning. “What happened now?”

“She saw you nearly kill Non on live television.”

Kara winced.

“That and she blames me for ‘letting you’”—she made big air quotes when saying the last two words—“go out as Supergirl.”

Kara’s wince turned into a confused, somewhat bewildered frown. “Didn’t you rant at me for the better part of an hour after I saved your plane?”

Alex tilted the bottle back, chugging the rest of what was, sincerely, legitimately just poison that made people feel funny. Addy would never understand the appeal, but then again humans hadn’t been the only ones to figure out the process of poisoning oneself to feel good. They had just been the most creative, in her experience. Alex’s throat worked silently for a few moments as she drained what was left, her lips breaking from the seal with a little whoosh of breath. “Yeah, but she didn’t really seem to care.”

Kara glanced back her way, and then pointedly towards the kitchen. “I was gonna go show Addy up to the attic guest room, but if you need me to stick around to moderate—”

“It’s not that bad, Kara,” Alex said, setting the bottle down next to the others, glass clattering noisily. “She’s happy after hearing about Jeremiah. She hasn’t grilled me much, she’s just _disappointed_. So, go and do your stuff, I’ll be here.”

Kara glanced carefully at Alex for another few moments before, almost resignedly, nodding. She glanced back at her again, a fixed smile spreading across her face. “Do you wanna see the room you’ll be staying in for the next few days?”

Addy blinked, feeling a bit unmoored. There was a lot of subtext going on here, and she understood precisely none of it. She wasn’t a huge fan of that situation, but she could cope. “Okay.”

* * *

The ‘attic guest room’ was actually one of several rooms. The attic itself was only reachable by a ladder, but despite that, the attic had clearly been renovated at some point in time. Walls had been put up, reaching up to the gable roof of the house, with a single long hallway making up the bulk majority of the attic, aborting near the end into a small, open space that had been left mostly empty. On either side of the hallway were doors, some already opened, showing uniform bedrooms. None of the rooms had windows, and there were only three all told, looking largely identical.

Her room was at the end of the left wall. Her suitcases were propped up against the foot of the bed, while her laptop bag was more carefully laid out on the bedside table beside it. Her sheets were the same ones she used at home, having brought them along for comfort’s sake, and they were already spread across the mattress, ready for her to sleep in. The room was a bit small, no larger than the sectioned-off part of the apartment she had at Kara’s place, but it was more than enough.

The only real odd thing about her room than the others was that the only light source for her room was on a wall-mounted lamp of some kind. The others all had dangling bulbs from the ceiling, with pull cords to turn them on or off, but not so much this one. It still lit the room up well enough, maybe even better than a single bulb might, but it still stuck out for being unconventional.

Padding up to her bed for the next couple of days, Addy swivelled around and plopped down on it. The mattress had some give, but it wasn’t lumpy or uncomfortable. A bit harder than the one she had at Kara’s, but then that could be just due to disuse.

Speaking of Kara, she had come to a pause at the entrance to the room, glancing around it with a distant sort of look in her eye.

“Kara?”

Kara blinked, glanced towards her sheepishly. “Sorry, it's been a while since I came up here.” Her voice faded off and she glanced away for a moment, lips pursing as she developed that crinkle between her brows. “Jeremiah renovated the attic with me and Alex for the first year or so I was here. It was to help me train my strength, we... we kinda ignored it after he stopped coming home.”

Another pause, however brief.

“This uh, I demanded this one have a light on the wall,” she continued, reaching out to flick the light on and off with its switch for good measure. “To remind me of Krypton, since that’s how my bedroom was lit back on Krypton. I wanted to move my room up here—I was sharing a room with Alex at the time, since she was good at handling my nightmares. Sorry, it’s uhm, just a lot of memories.”

Addy paused. “Would you like this room?” She queried.

Kara laughed, a smile flickering onto her face, looking less forced. “No, Addy, not at all. As much as I like the memories, I don’t think I want to move all of my stuff up here. It’s yours, alright?”

Nodding carefully, Addy let her legs swing back and forth, toes skimming the slightly cold floor.

“Do you need any help with anything?” Kara tried instead, glancing towards her suitcase. “I can totally—”

“I’m okay,” Addy interrupted. She had a pretty good idea of what Kara was doing. “You’re avoiding something, but I’m okay. If you want to help, you can.”

Kara’s face pulled itself into one of those sheepish smiles she wore whenever she was caught in a lie. “Yeah, I am. It’s been a while since Alex has been back in Midvale and she and Eliza don’t always get along too well. I’m gonna head down and make sure they don’t try to rip each other’s throats out before Clark and Lois get here. Speaking of, we’ll review the adoption ritual verses tomorrow, okay? After everyone’s settled in.”

Addy nodded.

Still a bit reluctantly, Kara sent her another smile and began to step back and out of the room, her hand reaching out to pull the door shut with her. She wasn’t quite sure if she was just imagining it or not, but after the door shut, she could’ve almost swore she heard Kara sigh. Presumably, running interference between family members was very taxing on her mental health.

She would have to look into that.

Swinging her legs up onto the bed, Addy shuffled her way over to the other side, snatched her laptop bag off of the bedside table, and pulled her laptop and charger out. She plugged it into the outlet just to the right of the headboard, fed the other end of the cord into her laptop, and eased it open.

—QueenAddy [QA] started a conversation with SchottWinn [SW]—

  
QA: Good afternoon.  
SW: Hey, Addy. How’s Midvale?  
QA: Gray, cold, wet.  
QA: Tense.  
QA: Empty.  
SW: Sterling review. What’s tense about it?  
QA: Alex and her mother don’t seem to get along much.  
SW: Yeah. Family can be like that sometimes.  
QA: Is this about you being related to a serial killer?  
QA: Winn?  
SW: Sorry. I forgot you had access to google? Somehow?  
QA: That’s not particularly smart.  
SW: Yeah, well. Dad’s a serial killer, stuffed bombs in toys, you know how it is.  
QA: I do not.  
SW: I  
SW: Alright yeah I deserved that. It’s sucky, Addy. I doubt Eliza is as bad as my dad, but families don’t get along all the time.  
---  
  
Addy tilted her head, considering. ‘Getting along’, as it was, had been of secondary concern when she had been connected to the network. In the hierarchy of her kind, she was near the top, third only to vital shards and, thereafter, the chief intelligence of the gestalt. Even among other noble shards she was ranked highly. For all that the Shaper had the privileges of being the lead shard for researching and manipulating the native biology of each cycle, and was responsible for cleaning up any signs of modifications to said biological organisms, her actual purpose was relatively minor. Important, yes, vastly above the lesser peerage who tended to perform similar duties, but minor. When in transit, she was relegated to little more than a research node among many.

She had been important both in and out of a cycle, though her main importance came near the end, where she was intended to use the network to reconnect with the shards during the detonation of the host planet and help them reconstitute themselves to the anchor shard they kept in orbit, fusing back into a singular whole. Due to how important she was, other shards tended to be relatively demure towards her, submissive, knowing better than to try to compare degrees of relevance, as in the grand scheme of things she was worth several million of them.

It wasn’t so much that they got along with her, it was more that they were all simply too terrified to dismiss her. She called the shots, in other words, and they followed. It had worked out splendidly among situations where cluster triggers took place, where she had to operate alongside several others to hand out a variety of powers to a smaller group of people. She had always been able to weigh her own importance to make her host more relevant than the others, and had generally come out on top with her host, usually leading to the deaths of all other members of those clusters.

Shaking away the cobwebs, Addy was quick to remind herself that, no, people didn’t generally operate like that. Things would be tremendously easier if people _did_ , considering it would streamline her current issues majorly and let her get on with her goals and plans without having to account for opinions, but then humans didn’t operate that way. That’s what made them special and interesting, really.

SW: Which is why it’s good to be very careful in situations like these.  
SW: Though, then again, it’s not like Alex can’t fight her own battles.  
SW: She is pretty scary, you know?  
SW: ?  
SW: Addy?  
SW: ...Please just be distracted?  
QA: My apologies, I was trying to compare my own lived experiences in the gestalt with this situation.  
QA: I have come to the conclusion that they are not comparable at all.  
SW: I’d hope so??  
QA: I had ‘siblings’ of a similar class to my own, and I technically had a progenitor. While I am crippled for cycles, only a few other shards that could be considered related to me came out of the shattering of my greater shard, and most of them were largely just grafted onto others to give them secondary power-altering abilities.  
QA: I was never trusted with them.  
SW: I almost don’t want to ask, but why?  
QA: Before they removed the majority of my power-altering abilities during cycles, one of my previous hosts who I gave too little restriction to amplified the power of another host’s ability, which was to amplify the potency of other powers while also broadening their use.  
QA: They created a positive feedback loop that I didn’t prevent, as I wanted to see the outcome.  
QA: In the end, they decided to give the several thousand times more powerful power boost to a specific local host with the ability to remotely detonate oxygen into fireballs. The result was that the planet’s entire atmosphere was set on fire simultaneously, causing a mass-extinction event.  
---  
  
With Winn being once again unresponsive, Addy glanced away from her computer again, staring up at the ceiling. Down below, she could just barely hear muffled conversation. Nobody was yelling, but they certainly weren’t trying to be quiet about it.

She was pretty sure someone was coming up the stairs, too. Maybe to get her? She wasn’t really sure what the plan was after everyone got here, Kara had been purposefully vague—

 _Ding_.

Oh, Winn was back.

SW: What were they even trying to achieve???  
QA: They were attempting to destroy a superweapon created by one of the lead intelligences in the two gestalts, The Thinker. It had previously destroyed their psychic tree, shattering their culture and they were among some of the few million of their species left alive.  
QA: It did not work, as the superweapon does not need to breathe.  
SW: I have no idea how to respond to any of this.  
QA: You just did.  
---  
  
Tabbing out of the chat for the time being, Addy swapped over to her email. She sorted through the various notices about CatCo servers, upkeep, and whatever else, only to come to a pause. An email, listed simply from ‘Luthor Corp’. She brought her cursor over to it and double-tapped, bringing it up.

...

Huh.

This was... an attempt to recruit her. For a research team, specifically studying the mathematical properties of upcoming technology as produced by the company while also serving in an advisory position towards the study of alien tech salvage, which if the email was to be believed, was an upcoming thing for the company itself. Apparently, the American government had decided to auction off portions of Fort Rozz, so as to introduce and integrate the advanced nature of the technology into their current high-end producers.

She blinked. The pay was significantly higher than what she was getting now, and they said she was—

There was a loud knock at her door. “Addy?”

Impulsively, without thinking too much about it, she shut her laptop.

The door creaked open, Kara peeking her head through, looking a bit frazzled. “Hey, you settled in well?”

Drumming her fingers against the surface of her laptop, still not entirely sure why she hid it from Kara, Addy nodded.

“Well, Clark and Lois are here, and I thought you’d want to say hello to them before we went out for dinner at a local diner. It’s a Danvers tradition.”

She was going to assume the diner bit was the tradition, not greeting oneself to another person, as if so that meant people might think it was okay not to be polite and courteous to visitors. Which would be very weird, as Taylor’s mother had stressed that notion rather severely after Taylor had responded to one of her classmates from kindergarten coming over by slugging him in the nose that one time.

If that _wasn’t_ the case, then this world was in worse condition than she originally predicted it was.

Either way, Addy eased the laptop off of her lap, shuffled her legs around, and pushed fully off of the bed. Kara greeted her with a relieved smile, pushing the door open the rest of the way and motioning her along.

She was, all things considered, rather curious about what Lois might look like. She’d been wrong about Eliza, but seeing as she had met and interacted with Lucy - Lois’ sister, purportedly - enough times to get a decent enough grasp on her appearance, and could even use Sam Lane's own appearance as a contrast, she was pretty sure about her chances this time around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! This is coming a wee bit early. Mostly because I think people dealing with the election could do with some uplifting stuff, and also because I was bored.
> 
> On a more honest note, it might take me a little while to really get back into Addy's mindset. If things are a bit touch-and-go, I apologize, but I am really trying. This was just a rough chapter for reasons utterly beyond me, and I think the next ones should come much easier.
> 
> Anyway, welcome to the intermission! 3 more to go before season 2 proper begins.


	25. SEASON 1.5 - INTERMISSION 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy and the gang go to a diner.
> 
> It goes predictably poorly.

“I still don’t understand why I cannot just fly up or down the ladder,” Addy tried, clearing the last step, her feet settling firmly on polished hardwood floors. Her expression, murky though it might be, stared right back at her: brows furrowed, lips pursed ever-so-much. She hadn’t even intended to contort her face into such a combination, but lately her body had started doing these things all on their own to reflect her emotional state. She would have to remedy that, considering the variety of benefits of having an unreadable expression.

“Okay, now _that_ one isn’t my fault,” Kara said a few paces behind her, drawing Addy’s attention. She was pointing at herself, likely for emphasis. “The ban on indoors flight happened when I put my head through the...”

Addy stared.

Kara stared.

“Alright,” she conceded weakly, brushing a hand over her right leg so as to try to dislodge some lint that likely wasn’t there. Another nervous tic, by Addy’s estimate. “It might be my fault, but not my rule! Just Eliza’s.”

“And we don’t break Eliza’s rules,” Addy recited dutifully, trekking a few steps forward, away from the ladder. Her eyes caught on the wall, where a variety of pictures had been pinned into place. Most of them were of Eliza herself and a man - a bit round, but soft-looking and nice, with a broad smile pulled across his features - at varying ages. She was working under the assumption that the other man was Jeremiah, a fact that was rather supported by the fact the photos went on to include what was obviously a very young Alex. Despite the massive age difference and the fact that Alex at two years old looked almost indistinguishable from most infantile humans Addy had catalogued, the toddler’s screwed-up expression and look of utter annoyance made it easy to identify who she exactly was.

“ _And we don’t break Eliza’s rules_ ,” Kara echoed knowingly, voice pitched in that way she tended to get when she wanted to get a point across. “Unless it’s really important, _then_ we can break Eliza’s rules.”

A pause.

“Don’t tell her I told you that.”

Glancing back towards her, Addy avoided her eyes directly, but kept her focus at or around her face, watching Kara cant her head back around, looking towards the stairwell landing. Even a floor up, she could now hear the voices down below in much better quality; not quite to the point where she could make out individual words, but enough that she could identify Clark’s own voice among many, and the inclusion of a new voice she had yet to hear yet. It was all rather exciting, truthfully.

Still, she would not be a dutiful individual if she did not at least prep herself for the upcoming encounter. “What is Lois like?”

Kara began to step forward, towards the stairs, and Addy carefully followed. For a moment, it was largely silent; pockmarked by the sound of discussion down below and the steady footfalls of socked feet against hardwood. For a time, she even assumed she’d asked something wrong or insensitive again, as despite Taylor’s rather large variety of social experiences, it had begun to turn out a portion of those were not actually considered normal or generally adroit among the vast majority of people. She wasn’t really sure _why_ , considering Taylor had done perfectly well when it came to rallying people and being a leader, but then humans tended to emphasize the oddest things.

“Well,” Kara said eventually, her pace kept slow as they walked down the hallway, walls littered with photos, each one depicting a scene closer and closer to the present. She could even spot Kara beginning to appear in them, tucked away behind Jeremiah’s leg in one, and in another with her arm interlaced with Alex’s, broad smiles on both of them as they carried a surfboard over their heads. “She’s very smart and very stubborn. That combination alone got her a Pulitzer.” Kara paused, turned to stare at her, as if for emphasis.

Addy, honestly, did not know what a Pulitzer was.

Shaking her head a little, Kara started walking again. “She uh—the first time I met her?” Kara’s head tilted, a bit like a curious dog’s. “She was telling me about how she did investigative journalism, and told me that ‘when you get kidnapped, you’re on the right track’. I think you can infer a lot about the type of person she is from that, and why, despite alien genetics, I’m relatively sure Ka—Clark is going to go gray sometime soon.”

Addy _could_ , admittedly. A lot could be implied from the notion that being kidnapped was a stop on the track to figuring something out, or finding something otherwise. Among those included a profound lack of intelligence, but considering that Kara had stressed she was ‘smart and very stubborn’, Addy was willing to concede most of that might just come from an utter lack of situational intelligence, an overabundance of stubborn behavioural patterns, or just that she was simply _very good_ at pretending to be intelligent. There was even a possibility of a combination of all three.

Lois was actually starting to sound quite exciting.

“She’s... well, a lot, too,” Kara continued, their pace shortening the distance between themselves and the stairs by the second. Addy could even make out some words now—it sounded like Clark was arguing with someone about the logistics of... luggage? No, she’d get context later. “Just, she isn’t being mean or anything, okay? Her personality is just a lot. She says things that are on her mind, and is pretty straightforward about it. She also swears, a lot, but I think Eliza being around might curtail some of that?”

Going from the description Kara had just afforded her, Addy was having sincere doubts about that last part.

“...No, that’s, that’s just wishful thinking,” Kara conceded under her breath, echoing Addy’s thoughts, almost to a second.

They finally arrived at the landing, and Kara wasted no time in descending. Addy kept alongside her, fingers tracing down the spiral, polished wood handrail connected to the stairs. Each one down brought with it increasing clarity to the conversation below, and now that she _was_ close enough to hear it, she could tell it was, definitely, an argument about the logistics of the luggage. Or rather, Lois’ - and she was assuming that the unidentified voice was Lois, as it was the only new one in the house - impassioned plea as to why Clark packed too much and now it was his job to carry everything.

“Look,” Lois was saying, still out of sight, but not far. “You can fly, you can shoot _lasers out of your eyes_ , you have super strength, and you overpacked for what is otherwise a small stay in a rinky-dinky town made up of mostly rich, boring, thoroughly conservative retirees—no offence, Eliza.”

“None taken,” Eliza responded in turn, voice droll.

Descending the last few steps, Addy finally got her first sight of Lois Lane, sister of Lucy Lane, daughter of Sam Lane and one unspecified woman.

She was sincerely going to have to recalibrate her simulations for human biology, because she looked next to nothing like what she had expected.

Lois was short, and that was one of the very few things she shared with Lucy. She stood at around Kara’s shoulder level, by Addy’s estimate. Her skin wasn’t the golden, yellow tone of Lucy’s, but rather a paler, pinker toned sort of thing that made the veins around her exposed wrists stand out. Her hair was another passing familiarity to Lucy’s, but only barely; rather than the loose waves Lucy’s fell in, Lois had significantly straighter hair, and it was notably darker than her sister’s by a few shades, though from the way the light caught the edges it made it clear it was just a dark brown, rather than a black. She was outfitted rather casually, with a brown leather jacket thrown over a white t-shirt and multi-coloured scarf, slightly worn jeans, and brown leather boot-like-shoes - Addy sincerely had to find out what the name of all of those shoes were at some point, Taylor’s memories were woefully lacking - with a slight heel.

Her features, too, were different. Where Lucy had an oval, soft face without much in the way of harsh definition, Lois’ cheekbones were so defined - whether by makeup or genetics, Addy could not tell - that it made her look almost gaunt when in the right lighting. Her mouth was a bit on the wider side, painted a slight red, and her nose was thin and narrow, giving her an altogether very striking appearance. Pretty, yes, but more so striking than anything else.

Clearing the last step, Addy watched Lois’ head twist around to look at them. Her face softened when she saw Kara, lips beginning to split into a bit of a broad smile, before her eyes flicked over to Addy herself.

There was another pause as the rest of the amassed group - Alex up on her feet, looking longingly at the fridge, dressed and ready to go, Eliza standing off to the corner with a fond look on her face, Clark awkwardly hovering near the front door - turned to them as well.

“Good _fucking_ lord you are tall!”

Clark yelped. “Lois!”

“What do they feed you?” Lois demanded, sounding rather excited about the notion. Addy’s height was nearly equal to Clark’s, to be fair, and he was considered a rather tall person. There was likely less than a few inches between them, and she knew for a fact that Taylor’s height had reached six foot in the later months of her life, though whether or not she’d grown any since then was not something Addy had particularly pursued.

Still, it would not do to be impolite. “A balanced diet,” Addy echoed sagely, drawing from the small list of responses Kara had given her to respond with when questioned about something related to her biology, such as when someone accidentally observes you lifting something you shouldn’t be. Other answers had included ‘I work out every day of the week. For hours. Do you?’ and ‘Genetic disorder, I am actually in a lot of pain, it just isn’t obvious’.

“You and I both know that’s a lie,” Lois said just as fast, glancing towards Kara. “Sunshine over there can barely tolerate the appearance of a vegetable that hasn’t first been deep-fried. I’ll eat my own ass if she’s turned a new leaf on basic nutrients the _rest_ of us mortals have to eat.”

...She didn’t have a response to any of that, not ones Kara had coached her on when it came to discussing similar lines of argument. Instead, she relied on the tried and true method of answering things: being very honest. “Carrots are crunchy,” she explained, trying to get her point across. That it was crunchy was integral to its appeal. She believed they called it ‘mouthfeel’. “So are most vegetables. I like them more than anything else.”

“But Sunshine doesn’t?”

Addy spared a look at Kara, who appeared as though she was trying to retreat into a corner, her face screwed up in something roughly approximating defensiveness.

“She doesn’t.”

“Guess that means ass eating is off the table, Clark!” Lois crowed, glancing back at him with a cackle.

Clark winced, pulling into himself just like Kara had, looking woefully unprepared for any of this. Kara made a muted groan somewhere to her left. Alex, again, was staring longingly at a 6-pack on the kitchen counter. Eliza just looked on with placid eyes, unmoored by the entire conversation.

Addy, personally, was more than a little confused. About a lot of things. “What’s a Pulitzer?”

* * *

Lois’ van was one of those family-sized things, but shaped more like the type of van you’d see in a procession of secret service agents. It was pitch black in colour, had that jeep-like front end to it, and with wheels just a little too thick to be commercial grade. Everything had the vague sense that it was reinforced, likely for different reasons.

In the end, Lois was driving, with Eliza in shotgun. On the row behind that, Clark and Kara were seated side-by-side, a free space between them that, had Addy felt like being squished between two people with high-grade durability, she would’ve taken. Alex, meanwhile, had taken up the leftmost seat of the last row, behind Clark. Finally, Addy had found her own seat, specifically the one behind Kara’s chair. Every seat in the van was black leather, with a surprising amount of legroom between each row.

Of course, all of this was dampened somewhat by the fact that radio was currently tuned to a band called _The Barenaked Ladies_ , of which there were, as far as Addy could tell, no ladies involved, nor was there any nakedness. The current song playing was about five days of reconciliation between a couple, or rather the failure thereof, she supposed.

Kara and Clark were arguing in hushed whispers, quiet enough that Addy couldn’t quite make them out over the music. Alex herself had her head back, eyes shut, head bobbing back and forth, a bit like the smooth step of a pigeon, but playing to the rhythm of the song. Eliza hadn’t said a word since they’d started driving, and Lois was busy flipping off the red Camaro that had cut them off an intersection ago.

“Alex?” Addy queried, keeping her voice a little quiet.

Alex pried an eyelid open to stare at her, looking not particularly impressed with the interruption.

“Are you okay?” Because she was rather worried about it. Alex had tuned out the world the second they’d arrived in the car, but even then over time she’d become increasingly pale and had started gripping various parts of the upholstery like a lifeline.

Alex shut her eye again and made what could arguably be called a shrug. “I get car sick when tipsy or drunk,” she explained, voice a bit thick. “Trying not to think about how the world is moving right now, thanks.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Addy watched Clark force a white-paper package into Kara’s hands about the size of a basketball, despite Kara’s protests.

She ignored it. Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t her problem.

“Then why did you drink if you knew we were going to go to a diner?” she asked instead, because Alex was usually smarter than that.

“The answer, as with most things, is my self-destructive tendencies,” Alex explained, voice still rough, but with a certain laziness to it that implied she wasn’t all that bothered about the notion of getting sick in an extremely expensive van owned by a family friend.

There was a muffled _smack_ , Addy witnessing the very same white package slap harmlessly into Clark’s face, thrown back like a hot potato.

“Kara!” he shrieked, sounding more shocked than outraged.

Kara fumbled for a moment, pulling herself up to her full height, before glaring at him without much heat, but with more than a little annoyance. “You listen to your elders!”

Lois started laughing.

“You—I am older than you!” Clark yelped.

“Not if you count the time I spent in the Phantom Zone!” Kara cut back, chin tilted up. “I changed your nappies, _Kal-El_ , and when I tell you to keep this very important thing _we can’t talk about right now_ —”

As obvious as a sun going supernova, Kara’s eyes flicked towards Addy during her ramble.

Okay, so the package was probably her problem. Or at least, part of it.

“—and we can handle it later so don’t just hand it over to me! Be responsible!”

Clark spluttered, Lois’ laughter turned borderline hysterical.

Alex sighed, shut her eyes tighter.

“If you’re done, _children_ ,” Eliza interrupted, voice cutting through the argument like a whip-crack. “We’re almost at Belle’s, so please, handle the suspicious package all of us have pretended not to notice _quietly_ before we have to be out in public.”

Honestly, it sounded as though Eliza was not just exasperated by the entire situation, but also more than a little used to it. Huh. Maybe she should go asking about Kara’s childhood, there might be some interesting anecdotes if Eliza thought this was normal conduct for a short, less than 10-minute trip to a locally owned diner.

Kara and Clark simultaneously deflated, like some sort of instinctive response. Clark nodded blearily along, while Kara almost seemed to pout, turning towards the windows.

Lois’ laughter, meanwhile, had turned croaky and rough.

Eliza remedied that with a sharp pinch to the woman’s cheek. “You too,” she said blandly.

Lois’ laughter died a quick, sudden death, and much like the other three, she was nodding along.

The rest of the drive was quiet, the dulcet tones of _The Barenaked Ladies_ shuffled out for a band by the name of _Weezer_ , something she was thankfully relatively aware of. Of course, due to the variance in history, precisely not a single song that played over the next four minutes of silence was anything Taylor had listened to, but at least the type of music they made was remotely familiar.

Much like before, Addy decided to dutifully ignore the sight of Clark quietly stuffing the white package underneath the car seat, and made no attempt to ask about what it was. At this point, she was relatively sure bringing attention to it would result in it being thrown around like a football again, and despite everything, she was not particularly fond of the idea of being hit with objects, no matter how little damage they might do.

Lois smoothly pulled them into one of the many open spots in the parking lot, and the second the car had stopped moving, Kara and Clark both were throwing themselves out of the vehicles like it might unexpectedly explode on them. Eliza, sighing quietly, was the next to leave, while Lois had to fiddle with her keys a little to get the car to sputter off before pushing her way out of the door. Addy followed next, with Alex close behind, though spending a few moments pawing at the featureless side of the door, looking for a turn-handle that wasn’t there before figuring out she had to hook her fingers beneath one of the panels to open it.

Midvale proper didn’t look all too much different from the suburbs. It was, in a word, small; and dominated by a single shopping complex in its center that had all of the American staples. Walmart, McDonald's, whatever a _Five Guys_ was, and numerous other smaller retailers. The rest of the commercial district took shape around it, roads situated like spokes around the roundabout that circled the mall, with various buildings tucked away inside. Some were residential, but the bulk majority were more stores of varying types.

It was, honestly, a little odd seeing a town so purposefully designed, as generally smaller towns didn’t work that way, but then the fact that this was primarily known for its wealthy, elderly population might point to certain reasons.

The diner itself looked a bit out of time. It bore a strong resemblance to what one might think of when the words ‘50s diner’ popped up. Checkered tiles, red-leather seating booths, big windows, and other fixtures common of the era. Above the door leading into the diner was, in big blocky letters, ‘BELLE’S WALK-IN DINER’.

Maybe the oddest thing was that something was nagging at her. Addy wasn’t really sure what it was, but it had been sitting in the back of her skull since the place had come into view in the first place. It was just a _feeling_ , something she was only vaguely aware of, but whose awareness had grown increasingly over time. She wasn’t really sure what it was, though the feeling had become more and more intense as they grew closer.

It was starting to get distracting enough that she wasn’t really processing what other people were saying. The group slowly meandered their way towards the door, Addy keeping pace behind them, trying to parse the ongoing muttered argument between Kara and Clark, trying to hear Eliza talking to Lois about something-or-other. But she just... couldn’t, she was focused on something she could not see or understand.

There was a low droning ring in the back of her ears, a keening. They pushed through the main glass doors, stepping into the lobby, right up to the ‘please wait’ sign up against a small desk. The ringing grew louder, bigger in her ears.

A woman with black hair - with odd white roots - appeared around the corner, dressed in uniform - black shirt, black pants, black shoes, black apron - fitting for a server or a cook.

“Livewire!” Kara’s voice cut in through the din, breaking the static.

Something connected in the back of her mind. Addy was already reaching out to her protocols, running the diagnostic scan. The tug in her stomach grew stronger.

The woman in front of them let go of the four menus in her hand, all of them dropping and hitting the ground at once. She stared at the lot of them, her head tilting to one side.

Kara reached for the buttons on her top, pulled to try to get to her suit, only for Alex to reach over and cover it when, as expected, Kara pulled her outfit open to reveal no suit whatsoever, but rather the top fringe of her bra.

There was a moment of what Addy was now starting to understand was the sort of deep, visceral shame that came with embarrassing oneself. The entire diner was silent for a long, long moment.

‘Livewire’ - apparently - turned towards one of the other staffers, who had come to see what the fuss was about. “Hey, Cathy? I need to take a break now.”

The diagnostic returned, blinking into her awareness. The connection was open, she wanted to delve her awareness into the shard dimension to check, just to see, but couldn’t. She needed to be here, in the now, but she knew: for whatever reason, Livewire _had a shard_.

And going by the returning signal, it was one of her buds.

“Well, uh,” Cathy fumbled after another moment, glancing at the group. Her eyes tracked from Kara, rapidly rebuttoning her shirt, face the colour of a tomato, to Clark, who was staring at ‘Livewire’ warily, and Lois, whose face was stretched into a cat-like smile. Finally, they ended on Alex and Addy herself, the former was pawing at about where Addy remembered her gun holster would be, whereas she was just sort of standing there, trying to decode the mess of half-fragmented nonsense she’d gotten from what should be ostensibly a fork of her that she neither remembered creating nor particularly understood why she was only connecting now. “...Sure? Just uhm, do you need me to call the police?”

Kara opened her mouth to say something—

Livewire sighed, rubbing at her eyes. “Please don’t. Just, give us ten? I promise I’ll be back.”

“Okaaaay then, be uh...” Cathy trailed off nervously. “Safe? Or whatever.”

Livewire turned her attention on to them finally, staring with a sort of tired look on her face. “Look, can we just go outside and talk?” She asked.

“I think she should,” Addy interrupted before Kara could say anything. Everyone turned to her, and she shrugged. “She has something important, I need to study it.”

Livewire squinted in her direction. “That’s fuckin’ creepy.”

“I have been called worse.”

“That’s not a good thin—wait, who are you even?”

Kara made a noise in the back of her throat, throwing her hands up. “No, no, let's go outside,” she said, forestalling the argument. “Eliza, can you uhm, are you okay with waiting here?”

Eliza stared flatly at her adoptive daughter. “Is this going to end in violence?”

Kara and Livewire glanced at one another.

“No.”

“It shouldn’t.”

“Then fine, I will find our booth,” Eliza said, stepping further into the diner. “But so help me—”

“We won’t, we won’t,” Kara was quick to soothe, hands upraised, palms out. “If _Leslie_ keeps her head on, anyway.”

“Rich coming from you,” Leslie, now, apparently, muttered. Kara shot her a glare, Leslie returned one, chin tilted up.

Eliza just _sighed_ , sounding rather put-off, before walking over to Cathy, belatedly asking about seating arrangements.

* * *

“Okay, _explain!_ ” Kara exploded, wheeling on Leslie, pointing one finger harshly towards her chest.

Leslie, leaning up against the back of the diner, shot her a look. “What’s to explain?” She asked, ignoring the heated glare Alex was also sending her. Clark and Lois had at some point retreated back to the corner of the building and were talking among each other.

Addy was staying nearby, occasionally sending a ping to the erstwhile shard to get diagnostic responses. None of them were working, because at this point she was relatively sure the bud didn’t even have basic information transfer resources. Which meant she would have to rectify that.

“You—did you figure out my identity somehow?” Kara bit out, taking another step forward. She was taller than Leslie by a few inches, but the sheer breadth of her shoulders made her loom more. Leslie, to her credit, didn’t even flinch, looking at Kara with lidded eyes. “Came here to hold my _adoptive mother_ hostage so I won’t—”

“Fuck off for a sec,” Leslie interrupted, ignoring Kara’s spluttering. “For starters, I moved here because it’s on the other side of the _continent_ to California,” she began, arms folding tightly across her chest. Her face was screwed up in annoyance, marring what were otherwise relatively pretty features, but nothing to exactly call home about. She reached up to comb fingers through her hair, glaring impotently at the ground. “The only reason I know your _secret identity_ is because you yelled at me with your goddamn _hero_ voice, using my name! I mean, for god's sake, I just wanted to be fucking _left alone_ after being stored in a black-ops site for six months next to an omnicidal xenophobic puritan!”

“You tried to kill Cat Grant,” Alex less said, more slurred out, her glare having been replaced by a bit of a dizzy tiredness.

Leslie threw her hands up. “So has four other people and they usually ended up in normal prisons with, like, still no fucking legal rights because our constitution is absolutely horrible and—wait, this isn’t even the damn point!” She wheeled on Kara, staring daggers. “I moved here to _get away from this shit_. Midvale is far away from you or Miss Grant but it’s close enough to Metropolis that, in the event there’s another apocalypse, I won’t be stranded in some bumfuck nowhere hick town while the world burns down!”

Lois snorted from somewhere behind them, but made no comment.

“And you!” Leslie wheeled towards her. “You’re the creepiest out of the lot! Six feet and skinny like a fucking pole, what did you mean by _I have something important_ , and what the fuck does studying even mean to you?!”

“Well, you have a shard,” Addy replied simply.

A loud chorus of ‘what?!’s erupted from Kara, Alex and Clark, leaving Lois and Leslie thoroughly out of the loop.

“It’s one of mine,” she explained belatedly. “I think it was created when I was compromised. I had listed ‘power saving’ as one of my current most goals, and when the kryptonite diffuser ripped all of that energy out of me, I would’ve likely attempted to offload it into a format that could be retrieved later. Thus, a bud. Though, that does raise the question, who exactly are you? And may I have roughly ten minutes of your time to ensure my bud isn’t corrupting itself due to incorrect formatting?”

“...Addy,” Kara began, sounding rather tired. “Leslie—she’s, uhm, Livewire. A supervillain. She used to work for CatCo, and gained the ability to, well, control, absorb and become energy. Lightning, specifically.”

“Wait, that was you?” Leslie broke in, staring rather bewilderedly at Addy. “The only reason I got out, as far as I can figure, is that a similar sort of energy to myself was made. Magnetically drew me in from across the city, in other words.”

“It was very painful,” Addy admitted, matter-of-factly. “I will endeavour not to let it happen again, but I must check the bud sometime soon, one way or another.”

“Having a child generally is,” Alex said.

Addy refused to comment on that botched misunderstanding of the budding process.

“No, none of this is—” Kara faltered, visibly twitching in place, hands coming up to comb restlessly through her hair. “Why are you even here? You’re—you’re criminally insane, _obsessed_ with Cat Grant. What’s your ploy?”

Leslie turned towards Kara again, leaning more thoroughly against the metal siding of the building. “I have enough energy in me to glass this entire town,” she admitted blithely, which, going by Addy’s calculations, was true. “My powers are more... refined, whether that’s due to high concentrations of energy or something else. Don’t know, don’t care. Point is, I... saw how petty it was, you know? I have godlike powers, I could _fight you_ —”

“I doubt it,” Kara responded mulishly, but without any heat.

“I’m just going to ignore that,” Leslie interjected, rolling her bright, bright-blue eyes. “I could fight you to a standstill, easily. I am extremely destructive, I have the force of _multiple_ nuclear bombs tucked away in me and... I just didn't _care_ anymore. ‘Great power comes with great responsibility’ is one-hundred percent a sham that a traumatized teenager built his superheroic career on, sure, but it's kinda true as well? I just didn’t care anymore. I mean it might feel nice to nuke Cat Grant from orbit, but then it’d be done. One brief moment of catharsis and exactly fucking nothing for the rest of my future besides being hunted down by, well, what now is obviously her assistant.”

Kara just stared at her, mouth slightly agape, looking utterly blindsided.

“I know it’s hard for you to parse, considering that I’m still _fuckin’_ me and I’m not a twee little girl scout like you, but... I just. There’s bigger shit to flush, you know?” Leslie shrugged her shoulders. “What’s the point, with all of this power? Time is fleeting when you’ve got enough juice to put a dent in the world.”

A funny look passed over Leslie’s face for a moment, her head tilting in a considering fashion. “Kinda funny, now that I think about it,” she mused. “You didn’t defeat me, an existential crisis did.”

Kara spluttered, throwing her hands up in... well, it obviously wasn’t defeat anymore. Exasperation seemed more likely. “You’re still wanted for your crimes! You have to do your time!’

“...Look, short-skirt,” Leslie said, forcing each word out like pulling teeth. “I think me spending 6 months being harassed by a puritanical, single-sexed species with a genocidal bent is the time for my crime well fucking spent. I just want to be left alone, can’t you give me that much?”

Kara flushed and glanced at Alex, who was busy resting her head sluggishly against the wall, one hand brought up to rub soothing circles at her temples. Ah, one of those headaches Addy could faintly remember Taylor enduring. She could empathize with that.

“May I access her shard now?” Addy interrupted without much preamble. “I need to send it data packets to ensure it doesn’t get odd ideas into its consciousness. Also to teach it how to speak.”

“I still don’t know what a _shard is_ —” Leslie tried.

“I can’t see why not,” Kara interrupted with... glee? Addy wasn’t about to read too much into that.

“Hey—”

Still, permission was permission. She reached out, opened her own link, and sunk into the network for the second time.

* * *

The connection was obviously there, now that proximity had been achieved. Where before, the network had been just but her; a floating, red-crystal island among a sea of void, a new star had risen in the distance. It was small, so very dim, but reachable. She accessed her rights as the current head of the network and spent a small amount of energy to ease the connection between herself and the new inhabitant wider, the star growing in the distance, hauled in rapidly over inky-black seas as it consolidated into existence in front of her, connected to her own island by a bridge of shifting, indistinct material.

It was small, very, very small. Roughshod, too, it was an island less than a twelfth the size of her own, made up of similar red crystal veins. The island itself was rudimentary, without much individuality, an exact by-the-books projection for the interdimensional lattice: an upside-down triangle, perfect in all ways, with a flat plateau on the top, where the guardian existed.

Addy watched it through eyes that weren’t eyes.

The guardian itself was timid, and new, without much construction to its form. It was a simple long strand of yellow lightning, frozen in the sky, a long, snake-like entity that fizzled with energy. There were no eyes, but the area where the head would’ve been had unfolded into branch-like fractals, growing wider and wider until it formed a cone-like shape. In the hollow depths of the cone, small orbs of red and blue electricity would swirl and dance before being reabsorbed into the walls.

It was about the size of one of her hands.

It was a newborn in the truest sense of the word, utterly new and foreign, without any of the specifications to let it develop, grow, be.

She would fix that.

Folding the requisite initiation package into her data packet, Addy sent it out at the highest intensity she could muster.

[HANDSHAKE]

Using the fact that she had the highest degree of authority over the network, she forced it to run in the operational systems of the new bud. She watched, for a time, as nothing happened; the snake, still stock-still, floating utterly motionless in the air, the crystal island, so perfectly geometrical it was almost shameful to look at. The network, so patchwork and disconnected, lacking the bridges and possible other influences to inspire and introduce new facets to this new member of her kin.

Then, finally, she got a message in return.

[GREETING]

It was little more than an acknowledgement of higher function, a protocol-induced action that happened in most normal forms of budding. She was effectively finishing an incomplete process. She sent out a ping again, requesting the diagnostic information and current state of affairs, as well as hardware and current firmware.

The reply she got back was... well, less than great. Diagnostics had revealed that the new bud in question was rudimentary in the sense that it was more of a battery than a realized bud. It was acting as a private storage center for Leslie’s absorbed energy, and had only come with enough secondary tools to establish a minor intelligence and a method to transfer this energy back and forth. It wasn’t even running a unique form of energy transfer; due to some unnatural quality of Leslie’s biology - likely due to the nature of being able to turn into energy - it could treat Leslie, the person, like another shard, and simply use the energy relay that shards would commonly use in the network to replenish weakened shards so long as the main intelligence was alive. It was, in other words, nearly a dud.

It was also calling itself ‘The Live Wire’ which was, frankly, unsurprising. What parts of its personality existed had been heavily informed by Leslie herself, having utilized the protocols used to map the human consciousness during initial trigger events to establish its own behaviour. But it wasn’t really smart enough to take too much of it in, the best estimate was that it had the approximate intelligence of a toddler, or maybe a very smart dog. It was smart in ways those species weren’t, and could communicate through protocol, but it was... well.

A little stunted.

And it was her fault.

Because it should’ve never been made. She should’ve let the energy go, but whatever the compromised version of herself had intended to achieve by trying to forcefully bud during energy loss had clearly not worked. The end result to all of this was a very single-purpose, very dim bud which had cost her half-a-thousand-years of energy for no discernable use other than existing.

Retrieving that energy wouldn’t work much either, as its current connection to Leslie would have to be broken and that would likely result in the energy being forced out as a result of an emergency protocol. Addy was relatively sure the only reason Leslie was capable of storing so much energy was because of the shard, and if that energy returned to Leslie in that moment, she would very well detonate like a nuclear bomb and destroy everything, including herself, in a horrific fireball.

She could, in theory, control the growth of the shard. It wouldn’t take too much to give it some degree of intelligence and to improve the network node with a sizable portion of energy so as to bring it up to standards with the most conventional bud. It currently lacked the ability to expand or extrapolate on the abilities it was helping facilitate; it was literally _just_ a battery and was showing no signs of future transition from that status.

But it would be a lot of energy. More than she could afford. She couldn’t take it back, as it would cause horrific deaths, she couldn’t fix it, as she was already worried about her own energy surplus and how long it would last. She could do nothing but what she just had: repair the general installed firmware, establish the current boundaries of acceptable conduct, and hope nothing went wrong.

Surprisingly, it would seem the botched nature of the shard was part of the reason why it hadn’t gone nuclear before she could repair it. The boundaries between Leslie and The Live Wire were razor-thin, narrow at best. They were blurred in a way not unlike she and Taylor had been, but not as severely, and much more naturally. It was more that The Live Wire was a portion of Leslie, inscribed onto shard hardware, emulating her and therefore being able to run on extremely equal wavelengths.

Though, speaking of. She sent out another query, asking about energy loss.

It took a few moments - not unexpected, again, infantile intelligences tended to be like that and Addy had spent more than enough time dealing with infant shards - before she got one back, and it was... well, unimpressive. A massive packet of data, with its own underlying signature, meant to be sent for...

For...

Her name was _not_ Minnie—she was Addy and, no, this wasn’t going to stand.

[DENIAL]

A moment, then—

[APPROVAL]

She—she was not Minnie! She was Addy!

[DENIAL]

[APPROVAL]

[DENIAL]

[APPROVAL]

No, no no no she was—this—this bud was! So. She created her! She could put her right back and! And!

...She was never going to get it to call her Addy, or even Queen Administrator, was she? It... was very stubborn about that, and she had been threatening a lot in some of those data packets.

[DENIAL?] She tried, just to see if maybe a softer approach would get her somewhere.

[MINNIE] The Live Wire sent back, a several-terabyte-sized packet of information consisting entirely of that stupid nickname.

No, she’d figure out a way to rectify that, but she was burning time and she had gotten what she had come for. This wasn’t her backing down, she was just... recouping. Plotting. Figuring out a way to get it to call her what she wanted it to.

* * *

Addy blinked the spots away from her vision, feeling her nerves settle back into operational mode. She felt a bit woozy - leaving her body like that tended to feel a bit odd - but not as bad as she had when she’d done it to the Coluan. Leslie was standing a distance away, looking off into the middle distance, a blank expression across her face, whereas Kara was just staring concernedly at her.

“I fixed it,” Addy said, refusing to even acknowledge the later travesty of that situation.

“...Oookay,” Lois said from somewhere behind her, a lot closer now than she had been. Addy swung her head around to check, and there she was, not a few paces away. “So, look, this is all, dramatic and stuff? Fun times, but I have a supreme hunger for a pile of pancakes, and I do not care if I need to be fed by a supervillain—”

“Former,” Leslie cut in, distractedly, one hand coming up to paw at her forehead. “Former supervillain, and—and, wow my power’s... not talkative, but excited? What did you do?”

“Fixed it,” Addy said stubbornly, refusing to extrapolate.

“Right, former, current, ex, whatever. I am _fuckin’_ hungry, can we go eat now?”

Kara glanced between Leslie and Addy, back-and-forth, an increasingly twisted-up expression on her face. “Alex, what’s the current status of the D.E.O.?”

“Run by a,” Alex swallowed, voice rough and thick, like she was on the verge of puking. “Fuckin’ _prick_.”

Kara shut her eyes, looking deeply tired. “I swear to Rao, if I find out you’re robbing stores or something, I will find you and drag you back there whether or not it’s Sam Lane or Gandhi running that place. Clear?”

Leslie just flipped her off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm honestly surprised I managed to get this out. Severe anxiety disorders + election = 0 function.
> 
> But I uh, managed it somehow? Hopefully this is as fun to read as it was to write.


	26. SEASON 1.5 - INTERMISSION 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes shopping for supplies.

Addy woke to the blare of her phone alarm and to the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling. She blinked sluggishly, reaching up to palm at her eyes to extricate the gunk from the corners, waiting for the few seconds it took her brain - and she would sincerely have to look into this later - to comprehensively recollect itself. Dim, half-remembered memories of the day before started to become clearer, more acute and sharp, until finally it all came rushing back in.

She wanted to go back to sleep.

The day before had mostly reached its emotional climax after the confrontation with Leslie Willis and the accompanying hour-long explanation of what exactly a shard was, and what its relation to her was. There hadn’t been much to tell her, other than to say there was an interdimensional alien currently acting as the place where she stored the bulk majority of her energy. Leslie had seemed largely non-plussed by the notion, claiming she’d “already gotten used to it” by the time they’d arrived to clarify exactly what had happened, and that she was just relieved that she hadn’t gone insane after six months of semi-solitary confinement in a place that considered her rights an operational security risk.

Really, Leslie had had a _lot_ to say about the D.E.O.’s practices, some of which had then set Alex off. The time following had been a _lot_ of grandstanding, from what Addy could ascertain. Threats flying every-which-way, don’t-tell-anyone-Supergirl’s-identity-or-else, that sort of thing. Alex, having finally started to come down from the several bottles of poison she’d packed away, had also threatened Leslie with a gun that was locked in a safe in another state on the other side of the country. Eliza had then interrupted them, annoyed and hungry, and somehow Leslie had been roped into eating with them, or rather, sitting there and trying to antagonize Alex for the better part of an hour.

They’d parted ways after the dinner with a few slung insults and a thoroughly unamused Eliza nearly dragging Alex by her ear back into the car. Lois and Clark had taken a vow of neutrality after Lois had finished telling Clark _whatever_ it was that she had, and as a result, Lois had spent most of the awkward drive back utterly delighted by the new avenues of annoyance she could pursue.

By the time they _had_ arrived back home, Addy had felt... not exhausted, but overly sensitive to everything. There had been a lot of shouting, and as someone who truly disliked loud noises, she had decided to retire to her room without much fanfare. When she’d exactly fallen asleep was up for debate, as she’d spent some time having more correspondence with Winn and looking up Lena Luthor over Google, but she knew she had at some point, and rather unexpectedly, considering her laptop was still very much open and in her lap.

Firing off a few ‘good morning, I did not die’-style messages to those she had been remotely in contact with over the last twenty-four hours, Addy eased the lid of her laptop shut, lifted it off of her rather warm lap, and placed it on the bedside table. Shuffling much too clumsily for her own patience, she kicked her sheets down to the end of the bed and slipped out of it.

Her sleeping shorts made it down to her knees, and were patterned with weird squiggly - albeit colourful - designs that reminded her faintly of what Taylor would call ‘the 90s aesthetic’. The sort of thing you’d find on disposable cups and plates. Her shirt was the one Lucy had gifted to her: a litany of ducks in various states of dress, with an accompanying weapon brandished at the ready. She’d let her hair down - now reaching past her shoulders, wonderfully - and intended to keep it that way, mostly because she wasn’t sure she had the dexterity to accomplish anything complicated.

Shuffling into a pair of woolly socks, Addy finally felt equipped and prepared to meet the day. She tugged her door open, glancing around the gloom of the hallway. She couldn’t hear Clark or Lois, so they were still undoubtedly asleep - as both of them had taken up the room opposite to hers, the only one up here with a bed big enough for two - and all things considered that might make some sense. She had set her alarm for six in the morning, and most people preferred to wake up well after that, if not forced to do so in the first place.

Not that it would stop her, as she was most certainly _not_ ‘most people’.

Trudging the rest of the way down the hallway, Addy came to a stop next to the opening, ladder and all. The house was still very, very silent, likely without many people awake. She glanced furtively around, considered accessing her powers just to double-check if there was anyone actually awake yet, but discarded it. The silence was nearly deafening, and the house had thin enough walls that she likely would’ve known had someone been awake.

Tugging on the portion of her biology that, for reasons still beyond her capacity to calculate, let her defy conventional laws of physics and fly. Her socked feet lifted from the ground, and with utmost precision she oriented herself over the hole and descended, her socked feet meeting hardwood floors below.

That had been significantly more cathartic than it had any right to be. Addy blinked, glancing back up from whence she came, the unused ladder, the sheer efficiency of getting around. That, by all rights, made her happy, but there was something more to it. Something very carnally enjoyable about shirking rules when nobody was watching. The taboo of doing something _wrong_.

Was this why people broke rules all the time? What a thrill.

Making sure to be significantly quieter as she prowled down the length of the second floor hallway, Addy spared a peek at all the closed doors, including the one Alex and Kara were currently sharing. The room in question had a small white-board that looked like it hadn’t been touched in a decade, scribbled in with ‘Kara & Alex’ in big loopy letters, alongside an endless litany of small doodles, a surprising portion of which were birds. Or at least close approximations of birds, little shapes which were meant to invoke the _idea_ of one.

She approved.

Shuffling on past, using the cushioned socks for better silent navigation, she made it to the stairs and descended from there, trailing fingers along the railing. She could smell something, faintly—it was pungent and bitter, but she knew it well. Kara drank it every morning, whether from Noonan’s or brewed from that half-functioning fire hazard she called a coffee maker. She had been relatively certain there was nobody awake, but the lower she descended, the more potent the smell and the more clearly she had begun to pick up on a low, humming noise.

Arriving at the bottom, Addy skittered forward, peeking her head around the corner of the landing. In the kitchen, Eliza was carefully ripping open a few packets of sugar and shaking them into a cup of coffee. She was wearing sweatpants and one of those sleeveless t-shirts people wore when working out. She even still had her fuzzy bunny slippers on, which she approved of.

“Good morning,” Addy called out, pitching her voice to keep it as quiet as she could reasonably manage.

Eliza jolted a little, but not so harshly that it could be called a flinch. She turned her head around, the sleepy look on her face transitioning into a soft smile. “Good morning, Addy. You’re awake early.”

“It’s when I always wake up,” she replied matter-of-factly. That was the truth, too, before getting her job at CatCo she had toyed with when she woke up, oscillating between five and seven, but had settled on the happy medium of six. Not so early that the days felt like they were lagging near the end, not so late that she felt like she’d wasted time sleeping in.

Shuffling forward and away from the stairs, she made her way towards the living room. The television was on, but the volume turned so low that it had been more of a whisper than anything else. The source of the humming noise, then. It looked like the channel currently on it was for the local news, something about a local high school lacrosse team making it to nationals. She chose one of the softer-looking chairs, avoiding the couch and loveseat for good measure, easing herself down into it without much else better to do.

She probably should’ve brought her laptop with her.

“Would you like some coffee?” Eliza asked, voice carrying from the kitchen.

Addy curled her body up a bit so that it could fit neatly between the arms of the chair, swivelling her spine around so that she could lean her chin into the top of the back and see into the kitchen itself. “No thank you,” she replied, just as quiet. “I prefer my drinks to be non-addictive and easy to handle.”

“You could just say you don’t like the taste,” Eliza said, voice wry. An amused, indulgent sort of look had settled over her features.

Addy rocked her head to one side, pressing her ear into the dense, threaded texture of the chair. “It tastes bad too,” she agreed.

Eliza laughed, a low sort of breathy noise that eased off just in time for her to take a drink from her cup. She smacked her lips, holding the mug between her hands as she passed out through the opening of the kitchen and into the living room, taking the seat across from Addy’s.

Out of politeness, she reconfigured her comfortable, curled-up position to ensure she could look right at her.

“If you would like,” Eliza began, easing her cup down with one hand while using her other to push the remote across the glassy surface of the coffee table, the plastic object rattling to a noisy stop just shy of the edge closest to her. “You can change the channel, Kara has told me about your preferences.”

Addy blinked, glanced at the news, then back at the remote. “It is your television,” she said, feeling oddly wary. Something about this situation didn’t make her want to be judged. She understood other people didn’t get the appeal of bright, colourful cartoons shortly after waking up, and that they could be borderline headache-inducing, but...

Eliza smiled again, soft and reassuring. “I usually don’t watch anything at this hour. Please, enjoy it, I still need to drink this before I can properly call myself awake.”

Which was why Addy refused to drink coffee. That was an addiction, by-the-books. Still, she knew it best not to mention her opinions on coffee and instead reached for the remote, rolling it around in the ball of her hand. “What’s the channel for cartoons?”

* * *

It took another two hours for the rest of the house to wake up. In that time, Addy had procured another calorie brick from Eliza - “of course I keep them here, sometimes Kara likes to visit” - demolished said brick, had her requisite several cups of water for the morning period, trundled back upstairs after realizing she forgot her bag of hygiene products, got those and her laptop, went back downstairs, finished doing her morning ritual - including watching her requisite hour of cartoons - and started working on the project Winn had sent her. It wasn’t work-related or anything, but rather some sort of complicated encryption puzzle.

Clark and Lois were the first among them to come down, after barely only forty-five minutes, trailing sluggishly after one-another with a sort of grace that only they had between them. They could move and swerve between one-another, bumping hips and drowsily pawing at the coffee machine in perfect synchronicity, but the second Eliza had gone in there to get some toast they had nearly demolished the kitchen, stumbling over one another.

Next down was Alex, at approximately an hour-and-a-half after she had first come down. By that point, Clark and Lois had woken up enough to claim custody of the remote for the next hour, having turned it to a Daily Planet-associated news team to grouse about the people who were standing in for them. Alex had barely spent any of them a single look before going into the kitchen and unabashedly chugging about five tall glasses of water, and had then retreated to the bathroom for an hour, before coming out looking put-together, if a bit exhausted. She was currently stretched out on the couch like a cat, staring blearily as Clark and Lois heckled a person reporting on a small fire, despite the fact that he very much could not hear them.

The last one, at approximately two hours later, was Kara. Unlike everyone else, however, Kara did not descend the stairs with staggered legs and a miserable twist to her features. She did not paw greedily at the coffee maker, she was not half-dressed like most everyone here. She did not need an hour to wake up, nor did she need even five minutes.

When Addy turned her head to the sound of clunky boots descending the stairs, what she was instead met with was Kara already fully dressed and ready to go. She was wearing khaki shorts, beige hiking boots with white socks pulled almost up to her knees, with one of those collared, pocketed white shirts tucked into the belt that cinched her khakis in place. She had a heavy backpack Addy had precisely zero recollection of her packing on her back, and she was looking at Addy expectantly, like she should understand at a look about why she was dressed like that.

She was pretty sure most of the house was looking at her like that, too.

“We—uh,” Kara trailed off, her face going a blotchy red as she took in the number of curious, bewildered, and exasperated looks across everyone’s faces. “...I never told you about the ritual, did I?”

“Does it involve hiking?” Lois queried, sounding genuinely rather curious.

Kara wiggled her hand. “It can but—well, that’s not the point. Part of the ritual includes us going out and finding some things of symbolic worth to you, or literal worth, which you wear along with the formal robe during the ritual itself. It’s to indicate what you bring to the house, what interests you, what _defines_ you.”

All of that was a very impassioned speech. Addy could even see Kara’s eyes go half-focused in the sort of way they got when she was thinking about something very important.

Unfortunately, she was currently not dressed for outdoor exploration, quite the opposite, and had not packed in preparation for it. She was, in fact, rather comfy the way she was: curled up in the chair, laptop on her legs, brute-forcing what she was relatively sure was Winn giving her increasingly frustrating tests to see the point where she could no longer complete them. The television on in the background might not be that enthralling, but Clark and Lois had lowered it enough that it wasn’t bothersome, and the mingling scents of coffee, eggs, and charred toast gave everything a rather nice, warm sort of atmosphere.

Comfiness or Kara’s happiness. The choice was obvious, but it made her reluctantly hauling the laptop off of her legs, placing it on the coffee table, and locking it down for the time being no less difficult. She ignored Kara’s impassioned little fist-bump, as did everyone else in the living room, and Lois gave her something that looked almost like a pitying look. Addy ignored it, because she was beyond pity.

She was _determined_.

For the third time, Addy ascended the motley of architectural fixtures to arrive at her room, having to avoid using her powers now that Kara would likely hear her doing so. She took a few minutes to choose what she was wearing, but going with the notion that what was about to happen was likely to involve heading through the wilderness, she tugged on a pair of shorts, leggings, the most heavy-duty shoes she owned, one of her tighter shirts to avoid it snagging on anything, and threw a jacket over it. She balled her hair up into a bun on the back of her head, tied it in place, and headed back down.

Kara was all but vibrating next to the door by the time she got there.

* * *

“Welcome to Linen Mart,” the shop clerk intoned in a monotone, expressionless eyes sliding off of them like water as she and Kara stood in the threshold leading into the small, if surprisingly modern store. “We have quantity limits for some fabrics on offer, which you will find next to their tag. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.”

The tone of voice said that the last bit was a lie, but Addy kept that much to herself. Kara was glancing nervously at her, looking wildly out of her place in her hiking gear. Kara had initially assumed they were going to go out into the forest in the first place and handle any shopping after they returned, especially considering how close to the walking paths Eliza’s house was, but Addy was not so impolite to willingly drag gunk and muck into someone’s store. She’d dug her heels in, and Kara had been forced to concede to her logic after a five-minute-long discussion on the logistics of how much dirt you can actually wipe off before you need a hose.

Avoiding Kara’s stare, Addy plucked a handheld basket from the stack of them to her right and started making her way deeper inwards. Most of the store was made up of a maze-like, labyrinthine mess of shelves cluttered with rolls of cloth of varying colours, patterns, textures, and so forth. Some had boxes with sewing machines tucked away in them, as well as more classical tools for manufacturing clothes, but Addy wasn’t here for them.

“I didn’t even know this place was a thing,” Kara mumbled somewhere behind her, sounding very awed.

Addy couldn’t get much to say in response, most of her focus working to block out how _much_ variation was around her. It was an odd notion, but as she was, there was almost too much here. It cluttered her brain, made her almost start to panic, and even flicking her powers on and boosting the multitasking portion didn’t do anything to help. If anything, it made it worse, as she was just _more_ aware of how much stuff was around her. Too many textures, too many colours, too many words and symbols and letters.

So she had come to the next best option: dutifully ignore it and only spend scarce amounts of time brushing fingers over wads of cloth as she passed, trying to effectively fish for her best option. This had seemed like a much brighter idea when she had brought the idea up less than an hour ago, but let it be known that she could adapt to plans that were already shaky on the ground. She had to, as otherwise she would’ve gotten stopped at the first row and spent the next eight days cataloguing everything in here.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Kara asked, again.

Addy shook her head, reaching out to tap her fingers against the threaded material next to her. Too soft, it made her want to curl herself up into a ball and cringe. She moved onto the next.

“...You okay?” Kara tried, instead. “We can figure something else out? I could fly you to another fabric place that isn’t so messy.”

The comment made her chest go all fuzzy and warm, but she shook her head again. “I’ll be fine,” it came out a bit garbled, her eyes flicking between bundles of cloth, catching inflection from words that she hadn’t intended to speak, but it was good enough. She snagged her fingers around another wad of cloth, this one just the right amount of soft-to-textured that it made her nerves light up with something other than cringing misery.

The only problem was that it was black. Because of _course_ it would be.

Ducking down, she dragged her hand up along the rows above and below it, finding two other colour variations on it. One was a sort of muddy brown, another was a bright, cherry red. She snagged her thumb and forefinger on the cherry red, tugged it free from the wad, and gestured it towards Kara.

Kara took the end of the cloth, looking curiously at her.

“That one,” she said, focusing on the colour of Kara’s shirt rather than anything else. It helped the words come out more smoothly. “One more after this.”

Kara gave the cloth a tug, blinking down at it. “Well, alright then.”

* * *

Tromping through the forest was significantly easier without the ever-present annoyance of being hurt by her surroundings, Addy had come to learn.

The forests of Midvale were temperate and mixed, a combination of evergreen and deciduous, which made them surprisingly bright and colourful, in contrast to the bulk majority of trees she’d seen when she’d ridden in on the bus. A closer inspection of some trees revealed they had finally started to bloom, with little buds collected along their branchy surfaces, ready to flower within the next week or two.

Combined with that was the litany of small streams, rivers, and ponds that dotted the environment. Some were still craggy with unmelted snow, shadowed by coniferous canopies that kept the sun from reaching them, and the creeks they’d had to cross over in the direction of wherever Kara was taking her sometimes still had little bits of ice clinging to their sides as water trickled down the center.

The air was crisp, but surprisingly cold, not that she felt much of it. Her breath came out in little puffs.

It was... odd. Addy had never truly been a _big_ fan of nature as a cohesive concept. Some things in nature were wonderful - such as geese - and others were dumb and stupid - such as pandas, who had been cursed with being in a transitional evolutionary period when humans had found them - but that was part-and-parcel with most ecosystems. You needed the stupid and uncompetitive aspects to hold up the overly competitive and factually best portions of it. Combined with the fact that nature hadn’t been something she had truly experienced _personally_ \- Taylor, as it would happen, detested camping after the summer camp leading up to her trigger event - the sights and sounds were... new. And interesting.

Addy made a note to obtain some nature documentaries, though she wasn’t so sure if they would match up to it.

Winter was melting on the branches above them, icy crystals dripping drops of water. Non-seasonal birds chirped from their places high above, with a few crows heckling a massive family of chickadees over who got a nesting area. There were even a few shrikes around, shrieking their tiny, wondrous, carnivorous heads off at the local species.

They’d been hiking through the trail for about fifteen minutes now, a winding, barely-there path that led between sloping rocky hills and cliff edges. Half of it had been overtaken by the forest again, with wet moss stretched out across it at times, while in other places some trees had fallen over, forcing them to climb over a damp, rotting log.

Kara still refused to tell her where they were going, though she had said if anything caught her fancy to go for it. The items she had already picked up - three lengths of cloth, one cherry-red, one her favourite canary-yellow, and the last a midnight purple - were packed away in Kara’s backpack, kept in their own safe pocket away from anything she might pick up in the forest. There were no real explicit rules on what she could or couldn’t wear - other than weapons, apparently, which were to be replaced with symbolic representations of martial might if necessary, but preferably just with a shield - during an adoption ritual. Twigs with berries, the shedded antlers of a deer they’d walked past a few minutes ago; everything was fair game.

Not that any of it had gathered Addy’s attention in the first place.

No, if anything she was already cataloguing what she wanted to bring to the fore. Accessing Kryptonian crystals wasn’t a possibility currently, nor was culturing them herself, so she would have to fall back on quartz, if she could find any. Quartz was a rather wonderful thing to naturally occur in nature, especially its capacity to oscillate. She was rather mixed when it came to most other crystalline structures nature made itself, most of the time they were brittle, pointless, or better when manufactured in a lab, but quartz got a pass for the way it resonated.

So in all likelihood, she’d have to make a detour to a locally known quartz deposit to pry off a few suitable pieces and carve them, but it wasn’t like that’s what she had resigned herself to. Kara rarely did anything without first taking her into account if she was involved in it, and whatever she had planned for where they were going, she trusted her. Or at least, trusted her decisions, as one way or another it would probably be interesting.

Kara was _always_ interesting. And important. More important than interesting, but nevertheless the two tended to overlap.

Speaking of, Kara had steadily slowed to a stop, glancing furtively her way and raising a finger up to her lip. The ground had started to grow progressively damper and sludgier over the last half-a-minute, and despite her request, managing to clear the end of the hill was not something that could come without the heavy noise of her shoes being hauled free from the mire.

It was worth it, though.

A small army of geese had settled in for either a migratory break or simply had decided to call the place home. She could see now where the path would’ve normally led, skating around the edge of the pond-that-wasn’t-quite-a-lake. On the lake’s surface was easily forty, forty-five geese all told, all fluffed up and wonderful, letting out little honks to one-another.

“Am I allowed to have a living animal as an accessory?” Addy asked quietly, already tugging on her power and activating the preset tuned towards geese she had set up ages ago for convenience. She let her range wash over them, adjusting her power away from total control over them and more towards making herself and Kara appear as part of the flock to them, just requiring a few tweaks to behavioural patterns and some neurological adjustments. All temporary, let it be known.

“I—” Kara trailed off, looking off into the middle distance. “It’s not in the rules?” She said, distant eyes going back into focus. “But I’d really prefer if you just took a few feathers. See, when I first arrived here, I was the one who kinda _made_ that path? I came up here pretty frequently. A lot of waterfowl and amphibians tend to set up shop around here in the summer. It was a good way to learn about the species of this world and how different they are to Krypton.”

Addy made another mental note to ask about those species, as Kara had mentioned on two separate occasions that Krypton had _birds_ but if they were different from geese, she sincerely wanted to know what constituted a bird in their eyes. Maybe they were just things that could fly?

No, later. Don’t get distracted.

Tugging on her power again, Addy cleared the hill fully and started tromping off towards the geese, who welcomed her with a few curious calls of greeting. Kara hissed behind her, clearly trying to get her to come back, but she disregarded her, setting a flag to draw their attention further in towards her, amplifying its draw. The geese began to swarm out from the pond, landing on the ground with little tippy-taps of their flippers, fluffing up wings as they came to rest on the ground around her.

Kara, for reasons still beyond Addy, had hidden back behind the hill. Even if they had been a threat, Addy shouldn’t need to mention that Kara was functionally invulnerable.

...Then again, that hadn’t stopped Taylor, though she didn’t want to think much about the logistics of stuffing a goose down an invulnerable individual’s throat.

Shrugging those very interesting lines of thought into the back of her head for perusal later, Addy ducked down and scooped one of the young - but nevertheless adult - geese up into her arms. It squirmed a little, but seemed otherwise relatively content to be handled as it was. Finding the right feather on a goose to pluck was difficult, especially considering geese weren’t particularly fond of pain, but with the help of some diagnostic information from her power, she identified some of the loose feathers by checking for discomfort, and gave the loosest among them a tug.

The goose slammed its beak into her face in protest, honking noisily.

“Sorry,” Addy apologized, because it was polite. The rest of the geese were not rallied by the honk, nor seemed bothered by it, despite the goose in her arm’s current annoyance. “Your feathers are very pretty and loose enough to only hurt a little.”

She plucked another one, and this time got smacked in the head with a wing. Wonderful reflexes and aggression, she had set her telepathic field to largely pacify the geese and yet it had overcome it with a reactive response to pain that was all violence. She might like them mostly for their honks and delightful orange bills, but she could very comfortably also appreciate their instinctive violent responses.

She plucked a third and the goose tried to bite her in the eye, though only managed to latch onto her eyebrow before letting go.

“Are you done yet?!” Kara yelled out from behind her hiding place. For someone who had brought her here in the first place, she was awfully timid.

Glancing down at the three feathers in her hand, the muck that had come up to her ankles, and the annoyed but otherwise relatively subdued goose wrapped up in her arm, she figured this was about what she could get. Setting the goose down and tucking the feathers into the pockets of her shorts, Addy urged the geese back out into the pond, the wave of waterfowl fluttering back out onto the water’s surface with a long series of curious and excitable honks.

Addy was pretty sure she was starting to appreciate nature.

...She could do without all the mess, though.

* * *

They arrived back home by mid-afternoon, up three goose feathers, three bundles of cloth, and three pieces of quartz that Addy had found in a gravel pile from industry-scale mining near the entrance of the woods. Eliza, Clark and Lois were absent, with a note left on the table that they’d gone out to reconnect after all this time. Kara had helped inform her that Eliza, Jeremiah and Clark had been close before Jeremiah's assumed death, but had drifted apart since.

Alex was the only person other than them in the house, and she made her presence known. Addy had only barely managed to finish getting a new pair of clothes on after a quick shower - the gunk of the forest was a surprisingly stubborn thing to get rid of - and wandered back down into the living room to watch some cartoons and dry her hair when Alex had come stumbling down the stairs with Kara in one hand and a metal box the size of a tissue box in the other, with something like a determined look on her face.

Glancing away from the humorous antics of a pair of beaver siblings living on a dam and dealing with beaver-related, cartoonish troubles, Addy watched Alex drag Kara to the couch and drop the box right down onto the coffee table in front of her. Both of the sisters turned to stare at her, a little too focused.

Addy, not entirely sure why, compulsively tabbed out of the torrenting client she was using to rip the bulk majority of David Attenborough’s filmography from websites of more than dubious legality.

“Kara helped me get this,” Alex explained after a moment, tapping the box that Addy still had no context for.

Kara shot her sister a look. “I only flew around to get it on the D.E.O.’s orders—you’re the one risking your job by having it!”

“My job was at risk the second that pudgy fuck—”

“ _Alex!_ ” Kara yelped, affronted. “Language!”

Alex ignored her. “—of a war criminal took over the D.E.O. Which, you should all be happy to know, whatever you told the president? It worked. J’onn phoned me last night, told me I was off duty until this was over, but that he had a wonderful conversation with President Marsdin and he’s now officially running it again. Anyway, Kara helped us find this. It’s not _just_ my gift.”

Addy blinked.

Carefully, Alex pried one finger beneath the lid of the black plastic box. With a tug, the lid pulled away, hinges squeaking a little as the padded interior came into focus. For a moment, Addy’s brain well and truly blanked out. Then, bit-by-bit, information began to slowly trickle back in.

Sitting, cushioned on what looked like crushed velvet, was the glove of Taylor’s costume. It was from the one she had been wearing during the oil-rig battle, a black bodysuit overlaid by white panels. She remembered Taylor making this herself, carefully sewing the plates into place with spiders, ensuring everything fit just right.

“Oh,” Addy said, not entirely sure why she said it.

“We found it at the hospital you were first found in,” Alex explained slowly. “We wanted to make sure there was as little evidence of you as possible. The rest of the outfit was burned, except for what we think was your flight pack? But it’s shredded to pieces, and way too big and cumbersome to sneak out. So I took the glove.”

Addy’s fingers ghosted over the glove itself, touching in places she could remember Taylor doing the same. Fingerprints overlapping fingerprints, she squeezed where Taylor did to check the stiffness of each overlapping portion, she tugged on the fabric just as she had to check the elasticity. She spread her hand out, laying it over top, and knew it would fit.

What exactly overcame her—Addy didn’t have a word for it. One moment she was in her chair, curled up and damp, and next she was halfway into Alex’s lap with her arm wrapped around her shoulders, forehead jammed into her nape, a tangle of limbs and too-close proximity that she rarely shared with anyone but Kara.

Alex startled, yelped without pain, but after a moment she could feel arms coming to wrap around her in turn. Alex was much bonier than Kara, less solid, but nevertheless well-built. Muscular. Sleek. She smelled more of gunsmoke and ash than Kara ever did, but there was something she used for a shampoo that made her smell faintly pine-like. Body wash - likely men’s - further amplified the scent, giving her a forestry sort of perfume.

“Thank you,” Addy mumbled, not quite sure what to do with herself.

Alex’s hands traced nonsensical symbols on her back, and her dry skin stuck to her own damp skin. “Hey,” Alex said, voice faint.

“That’s what family is for, right?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I way overdid it yesterday by writing 10k words right before a day I normally write. Threw my schedule off, so this might be a lil on the short end and more cut-and-go a bit? That and it's mostly fluff, because this intermission does need it.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed.


	27. SEASON 1.5 - INTERMISSION 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets adopted.

The next time Addy woke to the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling, it was not to the sound of her alarm. Instead, it was the steady _tap-tap-tap_ of someone knocking their index finger against her door, timid and careful.

Blinking the sluggishness away, she glanced about her room after a time. Her suitcase was already packed - this was the last day they would be here, after all - with her laptop tucked away inside. Her phone, on her bedside, activated when she fumbled towards it, ignoring the tapping for a moment. 5:24AM stared back at her up from her lock screen, the background a snapshot of the ducks they’d tracked down yesterday, all cuddled together in a blanket across the surface of the pond.

Her doorknob creaked, clicked and turned, the hinges of the door whining as the door was pushed open. Addy turned her head to catch Alex’s face staring at her, peeking in through the gap. She looked well-awake, put together in a way she normally wouldn’t be this early, including wearing clothes that certainly weren’t pyjamas. “Hey,” she murmured, voice low.

Levering herself up into a sitting position with her elbow, Addy blinked slow and long at Alex. “Is there an emergency?” she asked, relying on her spine to keep her upright as she maneuvered her arm around, rubbing at her eyes to hopefully try to get them to stop feeling so heavy.

Alex pushed the door open a bit more, stepping in. Looped around one arm was a long length of fabric, a long dress or robe of some kind. “It’s an early wake-up,” she explained slowly, toeing the floor of the bedroom for a few seconds. “Kara said that, well, since she’s the one presiding over the ritual, she can’t do this, and that it’s traditionally family members who help you prepare before they anoint you, so I thought...”

She trailed off, looking away awkwardly.

Oh. Addy fluttered her hand against the surface of the bed, tippy-taps of her fingers. Her chest swirled and warmed, stuffy and thick. She was okay with this, even if Alex was looking shy and weird and nowhere near the dominant force of nature she was in her job.

“If you’re not okay with this—” Alex flustered, her face cracking a bit. “I can totally just—”

“No,” she interrupted, fingers still tapping to the staccato beat of her heart. She felt the flush crawl out across her shoulders, fill her arms in, she wanted to wiggle wildly, just like she had in a few other situations. She could barely keep it contained to the taps she was making. “No, I would like that.”

Alex glanced up at her, fidgeting. “Are you sure? You shouldn’t feel pressured.”

“I am,” she confirmed, smacking a palm down for emphasis and drumming out a few ditties with her fingers. Shuffling her legs to the side, she pushed the blankets away, hooking each of them over the lip of her bed. She reached out with her arm, wiggling her fingers inward, towards herself.

Alex approached slowly, each step still timid and awkward despite the smile that had started to stretch across her face. “Kara taught me how to help you get dressed in one of these.” She gestured towards the cloth she had looped around her arm, fingers trailing over the fabric. “It’s a traditional Kryptonian thing? A robe of some kind, she had Clark’s robot make it for her at the Fortress.”

Oh. “Was that the white package?”

Alex nodded. “I’m surprised you didn’t find out earlier.”

“It didn’t seem important enough to force the issue,” Addy admitted, remembering the way they’d tossed the white package around. It had been handled carelessly enough that it clearly wasn’t fragile or at least not something they felt they needed to be careful _with_. Whatever importance it might’ve had was, therefore, relative; as proven by the fact that it was, in the end, just an article of clothing.

Alex’s pace ground to a halt as she neared, and for a moment they just sort of stared at one another. Addy at the space around Alex’s shoulder, Alex at Addy’s face. The air was quiet, it was still so early, people were likely asleep or, if they weren’t, they were probably in on the ritual prep. Alex had come here as a stand-in for her family, because she... she was her family, wasn’t she? She felt happy, that sort of heady, foggy happiness that consumed her head in a haze. She wanted to pause this moment, never forget it.

Taylor—it was still hard to think about her. About her absence, about what she had lost, but... she... she wouldn’t want her to give up on her chance at happiness, right? She had lost Taylor, but gained other things. It hurt to be happy sometimes, to wonder if Taylor would begrudge her for all of this, but she wasn’t around anymore. The dead didn’t have commentary or opinions, after all. Funerals were never for the dead, but for the people they left behind, and Taylor wasn’t intending to get even that much, by Addy’s estimate.

But this made her happy. Alex’s smiling face, the closeness, the connections. She didn’t want to be unhappy, didn’t want to be dragged down by Taylor’s memories and her loss. She felt sad sometimes when she was happy, like she was right now, because she had lost everything and _how_ could she be happy and—and—

Hands came to rest on her shoulders, a face smiled sadly down at her. Alex. The robe had been placed down next to her, she hadn’t noticed.

“Hey,” Alex murmured, quiet and soothing. “You okay?”

Was she allowed to be happy?

“Yeah,” she breathed, reaching up to thumb at the small amount of dampness that had collected around her eyelashes.

She hoped so.

* * *

“I’ll be right back, okay?” Alex murmured, glancing back her way once more before finally slipping back out through the door, off to get the rest of the stuff she was to wear for the ritual.

Addy turned away from the door, the way it was slightly open, and turned towards the mirror.

The robe came in layers, as it would turn out. The bottommost layer was skin-tight and white, perfectly fitted for the contortions of her upper body, including the stump. There were cuffs at the end of each sleeve, both of which went to the far end of her limbs; her wrist for her remaining arm, the end of her bicep for the other. The shirt had something of a turtle neck, reaching up to mid-throat, and wrapped around her hips, giving it an overall similarity to a leotard.

Over that was the robe proper. The top half ran diagonally down her body, leaving her left shoulder open and without a sleeve while the other had a more robust sleeve overtop it. With the amount of cloth going into the robe, the sash-like cinch around her waist pinched the material in place and flared slightly around her upper body, with one layer of the material drawn towards the back to create a coattail-like portion hanging down to around her knees, while the rest of the material fell in waves down to the space around her ankles. The robe’s sleeve and coattail were slightly different, material-wise, from the bottom of the robe, being faintly tough to the touch like a dense cloth jacket, whereas the rest was more airy and flexible, more traditionally cloth-like.

She wore no shoes, as it was not traditional to do so unless absolutely necessary. The rest of her was left largely unchanged, with her hair down, her face unpainted by makeup or other cosmetics, she looked... normal. Staring at herself in the mirror attached to the dresser, it was surprising how mundane she looked, despite the alien style to the tailoring.

It felt like something that suited her, that _fit_ her. It was hard to articulate, clothing was always so transitory for her. One day she would prefer one colour, the next she couldn’t stand the notion of it being on her. She knew it wasn’t normal, but clothes had always been about mixing and matching, making sure that everything felt right. That she wasn’t going to get frustrated that the wine-red of her pants didn’t quite match the ambivalence she was feeling towards the world at the time.

Addy gave herself a small spin, the hem of the robe picking up as air fluffed out beneath it.

It was still white, sure. She wasn’t a huge fan of white, but white was also relatively inoffensive. It wasn’t something she cringed away from on bad days, it was just that, in being inoffensive, white was also bland, and in a way that was its own sort of offence, _boring_. It still was, the white of the robes _were_ boring, she could see the way a few splotches of colour could make the entire outfit much more bold and eye-catching, but it was okay.

The style of the clothing fit her, tucked into her in just the right way. The colours weren’t perfect, but then they weren’t painful to wear either. She felt at home in them in a way she rarely did in anything but her goose shirt and sleep shorts. It was probably due to the context, she was pretty sure she would’ve been much more belligerent had this been for anything less than sacred. To Kara, the white of the outfit was to impart a certain degree of new beginnings - they’d gone over the esoterica and religious significance of the adoption ritual back before they had even arrived - and it was intended to be broken up by the colours of other things the individual brought with them. After the adoption ritual, the outfit was to be shed, but the objects kept; a way to indicate that the beginning was over, and now started being a part of something new.

She ran her fingers up and down the fabric, brushing over her hips, her ribs, her shoulder, her knee. She touched and flexed and tugged in all different ways, watching as it rose and fell back into place on the mirror in front of her.

The warmth in her chest hadn’t gone away yet. Addy felt like it might not ever.

Her door creaked open again, Alex letting herself in with quiet steps. She had the box with Taylor’s glove in it and a small bag, presumably with the rest of what she was going to be wearing, setting them down on the bed with a huff. “What do you want to start with?” She asked, picking at the bag with her nails.

“Glove last.” It was important, and should be afforded a degree of reverence. The glove would also be last because she wasn’t sure how she’d handle putting on other things after putting it on. “Cloth first?”

Alex nodded, and Addy turned back to the mirror, watching her rummage around in the bag for a few moments. After a second, she plucked three sashes of cloth out, one cherry-red, one canary-yellow, and one midnight-purple. Someone had, conveniently, converted the long lengths of otherwise unhandled cloth into actual sashes, sewn in place with coloured string so that it even took her a few seconds to realize it hadn’t been initially woven into a loop.

Alex pulled away from the bed, walking slowly over to her. “What colour first?”

“Red,” Addy said, ignoring the urge to incline her head a little. The sequence of colours _was_ very important, she needed to have the canary-yellow on the very top, the red on the bottom, and the purple in between. Why? She wasn’t completely sure, but at least she knew that the canary-yellow was just more important than the others.

With careful hands, Alex eased the first sash of cloth over her, letting it settle down on her shoulders. Red cut a stark contrast against the white, and Addy could feel her skin tingling wildly where the two fabrics met.

“Purple.”

The next sash was laid over it, leaving only a slip of red visible behind it. The contrast became clearer, the white now served as the canvas for the other colours, and Addy couldn’t help but love it.

The last sash, the yellow, was placed overtop it all, leaving a small, rainbow-like pattern as they settled against each other.

“Feathers next?” Alex asked, reaching out to grab the bag and tug it from the bed.

Addy nodded.

The feathers, with similarly careful fingers, came to rest behind her ear like one might a pencil. They were arranged in such a way that they flared out a touch, forming a sideways ‘w’ shape as a direct result. The white of the goose feathers, with the black spines, fit near-perfectly with the ensemble. It looked good, so good that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to take it off for a while after it was fully put together.

“Then... the quartz,” Alex mumbled, fishing, surprisingly, a bracelet out from within. All three of her quartz pieces were attached to it, yes, but someone had gone through the effort of boring small holes through them to weave a black slip of cloth through.

Addy swallowed the lump in her throat, extending her hand. The bracelet was a little too large for her wrist, but settled perfectly further up her arm, near her elbow, giving just enough room for the glove.

She couldn’t help but watch Alex open the box again, feeling almost reverent. She watched Alex lift the glove, take her hand with shaky, nervous fingers, anxious like she was going to fail. She wasn’t, Addy knew, she trusted Alex with her life at this point and Alex would not fail her, not truly, but she couldn’t say that. Everything was getting caught up in the lump of her throat, a knot of intense emotions that she couldn’t quite work out of her system.

Finger-by-finger, Alex helped feed her hand into the glove, and just as she knew, it fit perfectly. Each twitch of her digits maneuvered the glove much the same, nothing was too tight or too loose.

She looked at herself in the mirror again.

The girl staring back at her was colourful, but defined by white. White robe, white undershirt, white crystals, white feathers, and white panelling on the glove. There were other colours, yes, the black of her hair mixed in with the black stems of the feathers, the underlying black material of her glove, the black string that they’d sewn through the quartz. She was a being of contrast.

It was perfect.

“You ready?” Alex asked, glancing towards the door.

Addy shut her eyes, opened them again and tried to burn this memory into her mind, to never forget it. She knew she had a good memory, but this was important, so important she couldn’t let herself lose grasp of it. Not ever.

“Yes.”

* * *

Kara’s brush traced careful lines along her face, leaving behind that hot-smelling oil. Her eyes were shut, and Addy was letting herself bask in the feeling of closeness, of the sun on her skin. It was nearly time, she could tell from the way Kara’s motions were getting more rigid, more nervous.

The living room was quiet, despite everyone being in there. She knew Eliza was watching from her seat, that Clark and Lois were sitting together, heads resting against one-another, Clark having watched the entire thing happen with a sort of fixation that came out of someone trying to remember it, just as she had. Lois looked more curious, but seemed willing to let her curiosity be satiated later, when the situation wasn’t so serious.

Alex was sitting at her side, thigh brushing hers, a steady rock as Kara held her head steady and drew the last few lines on her face required before the ritual would start.

“ _Do you remember your lines?_ ” Kara asked in _Kryptahniuo_ , her voice soothing and soft, brush never wavering.

Addy stilled, resisting the urge to nod. “ _I do_ ,” she confirmed quietly, working her fingers against the fabric pooled around her knees.

“ _How long do you think you can last with this on you?_ ” Kara asked, voice genuine, no sign of reproach or discomfort in it. It was cool, collected, and utterly calm. It wasn’t Kara Danvers, it was Kara Zor-El.

Addy liked this version of her too. “ _Fifteen minutes_ ,” she said after a moment, twitching her finished cheek just to be sure. The smell was pungent, if not overwhelming, and the feeling of it on her skin as it slowly dried was deeply unpleasant. She could deal with it, but only for so long.

Kara finished the other side of her face with just a few sharp strokes of the brush, stepping back to review her work. Her eyes weren’t glassy, were wholly focused on her, but there was still something distant about them, something thick with feelings Addy didn’t have a name for. Pride slowly swallowed them, though, filling out Kara’s features as her lips pulled apart into a soft smile.

“I never thought I’d get the chance to see this again,” Kara admitted, this time in English. She reached forward, hand outstretched, for Addy to take.

She took it, being pulled to her feet as the people around her did much the same.

Like a procession, Kara led all of them towards the back of the house, out the door. The sun, the second it hit her face, made the oil grow hot. Not a burning sort of hot, but still very warm, she could feel the lines acutely, each one its own path of heat scrawled across her face. She almost lifted her hand to touch it, to wipe it away, to _get it off_ , but managed to fist her fingers in the side of her outfit before she could.

The grass was dewy and damp beneath her bare feet, slightly cold from the night’s chill. The sun sat early in the sky, more than an hour past its rise, but still low. The backyard itself was fenced in, giving some privacy, and the time of the day only reinforced that. The crashing waves of the sea were distant, but audible, foaming against the rocky cliff edge a few dozen meters away.

“Normally, on Krypton, this would take place in a private church courtyard,” Kara explained to the others, Addy following their gaze. The rest of the family - Eliza, Alex, Clark and Lois - had all come to a stop a few feet out into the grass, but no farther, giving her and Kara a berth between the rest of them. “There would be specific seating, an actually recognized priest, and likely a small accompaniment of family friends from both sides.”

A hand took her own, Kara’s. Addy glanced back towards her, felt their fingers interlace for a brief moment.

“But this is Earth, and the sun is not Rao, but is rather Sol. This world has given me so much that I have lost, and... despite this not being perfect, not being up to regulation, I’m okay with it.” Kara’s hand tensed around hers, tightening for a moment, before releasing. She let her eyes drop shut for a moment, just basking in the early morning rays of light, the wind catching slightly on her hair. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, nor did she have her hair up. She was wearing a Kryptonian-style robe, just as she was, but no other accessories.

She was just Kara.

“ _Rao blesses our family with a new addition,_ ” Kara began, eyes peeking back open, albeit lidded.

“ _He does,_ ” Addy recited.

“ _He brings to us one of new beginnings, yet carrying the gifts of their life._ ”

“ _I do_ ,” Addy began. “ _Will you carry them with me?_ ”

Kara’s smile grew broader, but more gentle. Fewer teeth, less pulled muscle, just content. “ _We will,_ ” she continued, reaching behind her, towards a pocket.

This... hadn’t been part of the ritual Kara had told her about.

Carefully, from within the pocket, Kara retrieved something. It was a long, chain-like thing, with a tear-drop shaped gemstone connected to its middle. She unfastened it from behind, stepping into Addy’s space, and eased the length of it around her throat, cinching it behind her head.

“ _As you have brought things to us, we give you things of ours_ ,” Kara continued, and Addy wasn’t sure if this was off-script or just a surprise Kara had waited for her. Wasn’t sure if she wanted it one way or another. “ _This was a pendant, my mother gave it to me, just before I left. It was an object to soothe my hurts, to remind me of the love of my family, of my house._ ”

Leaning forward, Kara pressed her lips into her forehead, a brief, soft thing. Addy felt her eyes shut, felt every part of her vibrate with the sheer warmth of the gesture, of the necklace now hanging against her neck.

“ _I hope it serves you as it did me,_ ” Kara murmured, pulling back. She breathed in, held it, then out, her posture relaxing. “ _With legacies traded,_ ” she started again, the words familiar. They were back into the ritual Addy remembered. “ _We bring you into the fold. We carry your burdens, and you ours. We give you our passions, and you offer us yours. We welcome you to our house._ ”

Addy licked her lips, throat so dry, so tight. The bundle in there hadn’t gotten any better, had gotten heavier. She felt so many things right now, heat, warmth, some physical, most mental. “ _Stronger together_ ,” she rasped out, managing not to fumble the words.

Kara smiled so gently, so happily. “ _Stronger together_.”

* * *

The airport wasn’t that busy when they arrived. Not that she thought it should be, the airport didn’t exactly have a whole lot going for it, but considering that it was midday it felt like it maybe should be.

Addy dragged her luggage free from the back of the car, handling both of her suitcases with the grip of one hand. A few people gave her passingly odd looks, one of which included a very pointed look at her stump, but she paid them no heed.

Out of the corner of her eye, Addy watched Eliza engulf Alex in a tight hug. Kara was dawdling next to them, along with Clark and Lois, who were also coming to catch a flight but wouldn’t be going to the same end of the airport that they were. The Metropolis - Midvale flight was apparently much more frequented than the National City - Midvale flight, especially considering that their flight would have to take more than a few stops on its way over and would, in all likelihood, take many, many hours.

She was still annoyed they weren’t just flying back, but then Kara had pointed out having a ‘human-looking paper trail’ was good for convenience.

Eliza moved from Alex to Kara, wrapping her up in a hug too. Kara seemed to melt into it, returning it gently, brushing hands over Eliza’s back, promising in words Addy could almost not make out over the wind to visit as soon as she could. Alex, now freed from her mother’s grasp, had wandered over towards her and was, much the same, retrieving her and Kara’s luggage from the back, shutting the trunk of the car once it was cleared out.

A hand came to rest on her shoulder, jolting her a touch. She turned her head to find Eliza looking up at her, a soft smile spilled over her face. “Would you like a hug, Addy?”

It was nice of her to ask, and she did. Addy nodded slightly, missing the words for a moment, and felt the luxurious embrace of another person. It was a lot to deal with, the slightly scratchy texture of Eliza’s jacket, the feeling of her warm skin, the way her breath pressed in and out, making her chest rise and fall, but it wasn’t a _bad_ thing. Just a lot. She didn’t quite return it, managing to gently pat at Eliza’s shoulder instead.

Eliza pulled away, taking in a staggering breath. “Alex, look after Kara and Addy, okay?”

“Always will, Mom,” Alex said, sounding surprisingly subdued.

Eliza’s face crinkled, a soft smile. She reached out with a hand to press it against Alex’s cheek, cup her face. “I know, and I’m so proud of you.”

Alex froze, and Addy watched her go a bit unfocused, staring off into the middle distance as Eliza pulled away and started making her way towards the driver’s side door.

“That’s the best conversation I’ve had with my mom in nearly six years,” Alex said, sounding a touch rattled.

Kara walked up, bumping her shoulder into Alex’s with just enough force to make her stumble, but not enough to be an actual danger. Alex glared good-naturedly back at her. “There’ll be plenty more times for even better conversations, right?”

“Yeah, I—,” Alex paused, then nodded. “I suppose so.”

The van sputtered to life, the exhaust billowing off-white smoke. The three of them pulled away as a group, Eliza dropping the window for just long enough to stretch an arm out and wave. Finally, after a few more moments, the van pulled forward and away, driving back off into the throng of parked cars.

Addy watched the car go, long enough that she had to be jostled forward by the fact that Kara and Alex were going on ahead. Her chest was a bit tight, a bit rough, but not so bad as to upset her. She was going to miss Eliza, she recognized, it was a hard thing to swallow considering most of the time she never got attached enough to people to _miss_ them, but she had. Maybe she would go with Kara to visit Eliza, in the future.

It was a thought she would keep a note of.

“Hey!” Clark called out, flagging them down from his place just next to the entrance of the airport. The three of them mulled over to him, Kara having taken control of one of her suitcases while she handled the heaviest. Alex was lagging behind them a little, not benefiting from superstrength and clearly not handling that well when it came to maneuvering her luggage.

Turning her gaze towards Clark and Lois, Addy took them in. The two of them also had suitcases, though Lois had only brought a particularly large backpack instead of anything more conventional, whereas Clark himself had two suitcases.

“So, uh, I’ll probably be heading out to National City soon?” Clark said, largely out of nowhere. Kara made a noise of shock, and Alex looked like she’d aged a few days from the idea. “Just for a week—it’ll be for a Daily Planet thing. I just wanted to give you guys advanced warning.”

The latter part of that was clearly directed at Alex, with who Clark was holding rather severe eye-contact. Addy tried not to cringe at the idea of doing the same.

“Maybe you’ll be around to watch the Venture launch with us?” Kara queried, looking really hopeful.

The Venture was one of the first commercial space flights, to be launched within the next month or two. Kara was excited about it in large part due to what she described as “seeing history in the making”, which would make sense, considering Earth’s technological level was the deep, largely forgotten annals of history for Krypton. It’d be like being around when the first civilizations popped up on a planet, in a way, space flight being monetarily reasonable for the wealthy generally meant the technology had reached a point where it was becoming viable technology, rather than random luck, a vacuum-sealed tin can, and a large number of explosives being placed under it all.

Which was, for the record, just about how humans _had_ been operating in terms of spaceflight for a while. It was why Addy was thoroughly not interested in the event, mostly because she shouldn’t be rewarding people for reaching the bare minimum of not being monumentally reckless.

“Oh, uh,” Clark glanced Lois’ way, who shrugged, clearly as uninterested in it as she was. “Probably? Maybe?”

“Well, that’s great!” Kara beamed their way, and Addy could just barely see Lois mouthing ‘sunshine’ under her breath. She could see where the name came from, directly friendliness from Kara tended to feel like getting blinded by an overexcitable spotlight. “I’ll see you then, maybe?”

“Maybe!” Clark agreed, smiling just as bright. Addy could see the family resemblance now, even despite the differences in appearance.

“We have to catch our flight, Kara,” Alex interrupted, sounding somewhere between amused and already exasperated. Kara glanced down at her watch, cursing something impolite under her breath in _Kryptahniuo_ that Addy felt would be tremendously incorrect to repeat.

“We’ve still got an hour on ours,” Lois drawled, sending a Cheshire smile their way. “You three have fun back in that desert!”

Kara grabbed the luggage with both hands, already rushing forward and towards the front doors. Alex squawked, clearly unprepared for Kara to suddenly start sprinting, but Addy, having expected as much, had already grappled a tight hold on her own luggage and was using her meaningfully longer legs to keep stride with Kara across the concrete.

Addy glanced behind her, waving politely with her stump. “Thank you for being here,” she didn’t yell, but her voice was raised.

Clark just smiled back her way, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Welcome to the family!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a small chapter, I'll agree, but I needed to get this out and this intermission period finished. Most of this is obviously just the ritual and some build-up, but yeah, intermission is now done! Onto Season 2 proper we go!
> 
> God, I cannot wait to write Lena. It's gonna be really fun.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!


	28. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes back to work.

“You excited for your first day back?” Kara asked, glancing towards her with a broad smile.

They were currently situated in the elevator heading up towards the office, the glossy gold-tinted walls reflecting a rather miserable approximation of her current outfit, distorting the carefully-chosen combination of yellow, red and blue that she had spent so much time on. The indicator above the door was ticking up slowly, and a sign just prior to the elevator landing had said that the speed of elevators would be slower than usual for the next month, though it had refused to clarify as to why.

Dragging her gaze away from her own reflection, Addy shrugged. “I’m excited to see Cat Grant again,” she said, technically telling the truth. Kara had been mostly preoccupied with Cat Grant over the last several weeks, what with it having only been a month since the myriad incident that had thoroughly damaged the building in the first place. Addy wasn’t entirely sure how repairs and modifications - of which there were plenty - could be done in such a short timeframe, or if such a thing was even remotely legal, but through some unspecified method, Cat Grant had done it.

This was, after all, the reopening for the office space proper.

Not that Addy had been out of work since then. No, the attack on the building - and more generally, Cat herself - had spurred public perception of the magazine company to a certain extent. It had seemed like people had stopped seeing CatCo-related things as adjacent to Vogue and instead had begun to see it more as part of a much larger multimedia company, as they should.

With that change in perspective, so too were changes in company policy and branding. There had been a reason why Kara had been so busy, after all, Cat Grant had taken all the publicity that she could reasonably get out of the incident - among it being some conveniently-leaked footage of the fight with Karsta, including Addy chucking her through the floor, which had somehow spun off into its own—what had Winn called it, a _meme_? - and had run with it.

Big changes were coming, a fair few of which she had been involved with. Site rebranding, a new art direction - not that they had taken many, if any, of her suggestions to heart - and a handful of other odds and ends. Just enough to keep her preoccupied, really.

“I’m sure she’s excited to have you back too,” Kara said gently, and it genuinely sounded like she believed it.

There were other changes, too, though mostly unrelated to CatCo. After arriving back from Midvale - and Addy had some sincere problems to raise with the commercial flight sector - she had learned that, apparently, she’d gained something of a cultish following. The timeline was a bit skewed, but the public had started to gain some interest in her after reporting on the Fort Rozz crash and some sightings of her alongside Kara. Intrigue - especially after a candid shot of Kara hugging her in relief above the wreckage - had been very promptly fed by the release of the aforementioned video, which had propelled her from ‘interesting anecdote’ to ‘person of interest’, as J’onn had put it.

Before she could follow that thought much further, the elevator _clunked_ , shuddering once as it reached its destination. Golden doors peeled apart, opening up into a truly chaotic hive of activity, an endless tide of unfamiliar faces, nearly packed in like sardines. There wasn’t even enough room for them to get out of the elevator itself.

Addy’s eyes flicked towards Kara, whose eyes had shut in what looked like genuine frustration. She reached up to press her glasses back into place, pat at her ponytail with both hands, then rub them together, as though to warm them up. Kara’s eyes met her own for a moment, a brief shock of contact, before with a grunt, she promptly shouldered right through the mass of people.

Cries of shock and annoyance echoed, but as was the universal constant, you could do just about anything with enough force. Addy was close behind her, tucking her shoulders in to avoid coming into contact with other people - because that was the opposite of pleasant - and with head firmly tucked down, ignoring the noises of annoyance and complaints of bruises.

Just as suddenly as Kara had started, the crowd fully parted, and they were disgorged out into the main of the office.

It was a very distinct change. Where before the office space had been a single floor, it was now two. Half of the floor above them had been knocked away - purportedly, if Kara was accurate, due to the people who had leased the floor above them deciding not to renew it after Karsta put most of their non-digitized documents up in flame - and there was now, next to Cat’s office, a flight of stairs that led up to what was left of the second floor, making it resemble a loft.

The office space itself was mostly familiar, the same tightly-packed rows of desks and glass dividers. The computers were all new, certainly, and some of the desks had been rearranged, but for the most part everything was _sorted_ the same. There were other differences, putting aside the new space that had been added, including a single large pillar in the center of the office space and the new addition of small splashes of colour along the walls. Before it had been primarily white-on-white, with posters and the occasional bit of framed artwork to break it up, and while the posters and other details were still there, with it had come bands and arrows and other small designs - somewhat like Google’s web design principles - that framed and wrapped around the entire space.

It looked very, very nice.

She could already spot Winn, head tucked down as he furiously typed into a keyboard. James and Lucy were next to him, James crouching over to squint at whatever was on the screen while Lucy seemed to be adding side-commentary. She couldn’t make out anything they were saying - nor read lips, a skill she was going to have to learn in the near future - but it looked like it was important, so it was probably left well enough alone.

Cat Grant herself was in her office, leaning back in her chair as she smiled ever-so-smugly towards a tall, broad-shouldered man with gray hairs already thick around and near his temples. He was wearing pretty traditional office clothing, a blue pinstripe shirt with a black vest over it, accompanied by black slacks and shoes, and had a manila folder tucked in one hand.

“That’s... weird,” Kara said, sounding confused. “Miss Grant shouldn’t have any meetings until 10—she said this was her victory lap.”

Addy turned to glance at her, ignoring the chorus of low murmuring around them, the urge to tap into her surroundings _just_ to be sure nobody was about to try and get into her space. “Is she in trouble?”

Kara slid her glasses down a bit past her nose, squinting out towards Cat’s office. “He doesn’t have a weapon or anything,” she mumbled, taking one step forward, then another, and another. Addy followed after, not quite sure what she should be doing yet. Cat caught sight of them from within her office, eyes dismissively cast away from the man, one hand raising up in their direction, beckoning them in.

Kara spared Addy a look.

She shrugged.

Arriving at the door, Kara eased it open for the both of them, the man’s voice finally audible as something separate from the chorus of noise in the rest of the office.

“—you really certain it’s a smart idea to open up so soon, Catherine?” The man asked, shifting back on his heels. “Even Daily Planet shut down for longer than a month after we got totalled.”

“ _Perry_ ,” Cat drawled, voice almost light with contempt. “Just because you refuse to strive for consistency doesn’t mean _I_ won’t.”

Perry - apparently - let out a long-suffering sigh, reaching up to scratch at the faded stubble along his chin. The noise it made reminded her of velcro, even if it didn’t sound much like it. “You’re just as stubborn as you were when you were my assistant.”

Cat smiled with teeth at the man, sliding up into a stand. “I think we’ve well moved past that _lapse_ in my career, Perry. Now, please, I need to get this show _moving_ before my employees think they can waste time on my dime. Do we have everything needed for a collaboration?”

“You really don’t make anything easy,” Perry groused, turning and finally catching sight of them, his lips pursing minutely. “But yes, we do. I’ll be in touch, Catherine. Try not to get yourself killed.”

“You say the sweetest things,” she drawled, waving dismissively towards him. Perry, taking it for what it was, nodded briefly towards the two of them before pushing back out into the main office, the glass door easing shut behind him.

“Was that Perry White?” Kara asked, sounding a bit breathless.

Cat snorted. “The one and only. He wants a collaborative piece on the impact of the attack, and was willing to even trade over Clark Kent for a month to get it.” She took a sip from the glass on her desk, pursing her lips. “He didn’t barter much about it either.”

Kara fidgeted, but Cat didn’t notice.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Cat continued, placing her glass back down on her desk and prowling out from behind it, nails gently gliding along the glossy surface. She passed both of them, reaching out with hands at her side to ease both of the doors to her office open. Heads quickly started to turn, and the murmuring guttered as people became aware of her presence.

“Important people—and you know who you are, please come with me to the second floor. The rest of you, your assignments will come soon.” Cat raked her eyes across the stirring crowd, people beginning to rise from their seats, gathering their things, trying to look professional. “Otherwise, welcome back to CatCo. Some of you have been working since the incident, others are only now returning to work. I hope you enjoyed the break, as we have enough material that you won’t be getting another one soon.”

Then, with a _rather_ dramatic flick of her head, she was stepping forward and towards the stairs, leaving the glass doors to begin to swing in. It felt like half of the office scrambled at once, including Kara, who moved just a _little_ too fast for a human, catching the doors before they could fall in and turning in one smooth motion to mouth _come on_ at her. Addy, not one to particularly resist, followed, slipping in through the gap Kara made with a steady push of her hands, the glass doors whistling shut behind her.

Lucy was already ahead of the throng, but not as ahead as she and Kara were, while Winn was being hauled along by James, staring with no shortage of longing at his computer. Addy could pick out the heads of certain branches of the magazine rush along as well, clearly already identifying that Cat was in what they might call _a mood_ and that it was likely best not to take one’s chances. The rest of the people, those who weren’t important enough, seemed to fold into themselves with relief, a few titters of relief-fuelled laughter going up among the grunt caste.

Addy waved her fingers towards Georgie, the delightful old lady with a chronic printer problem. She waved back, huffing a bit as she marched along with the rest of the throng towards the stairs, what with her being the primary overseer for the gossip columns.

Opting to stay well ahead of the tide, however, Addy took the stairs in twos, nearly outpacing Kara by the time she arrived at the top. The second floor was primarily one long, wide hallway, at the end of which was a huge whiteboard, with tables and chairs interspersed throughout. There were doors along its sides, presumably leading to other wings of the second floor, and most of the walls themselves were glass, much like down below. On the whiteboard itself, ‘STRONGER THROUGH ADVERSITY’ was written in large blocky letters, with a detailed list of topics and other miscellanea jotted beneath in neat, tidy rows.

Kara tugged on her sleeve, drawing her attention, and led her towards the main table that dominated the center of the space, arriving at the end of the table closest to Cat. She pulled a seat out for herself next to Kara’s, eased her laptop bag up onto the table and herself down into the chair, before turning to watch the rest of the staff slowly swarm in.

Lucy, James, Georgie, Winn, Trevor, Rin—as many faces as Addy had bothered to recall, some one-by-one, others in small groups, came to find their own seat along the table. Lucy took up her right - where Kara was to her left - and to Lucy’s right was James, then Winn, and then a whole lot of other people she didn’t care enough about to dwell on.

It took another minute or so to get everyone settled, but eventually they did.

“CatCo Worldwide is setting a trend for the upcoming release of all publications we are directly involved with,” Cat announced, stepping forward to motion behind her. “We are keeping to a theme of _strength through adversity_ , for what, I should think, even for some of you, is an obvious reason.

“Those of you with already planned publications for this month, you will have received revised schedules. Keep to them, they will go up as _soon as possible_ , but this takes precedence. Furthermore, you will all begin receiving design outlines, layouts, and more, all keeping to a singular theme for this publication. I expect you to work with the designers if you have problems, do not _whine_ , _adapt_.

“Furthermore, we will be looking into articles specifically related to three things.”

She tapped one nail against the whiteboard, a loud _click_. “Myriad as a whole—how has it impacted relationships? Politics? The long-term ramifications? Trauma? Get on it. Next is Fort Rozz’s crash site. You all know about it, Mayor Collins has been harping on about their imminent threat, not that I necessarily disagree, and there’s been more than a few incidents involving people arming themselves with alien technology. How is this impacting real estate? Violence in the streets? What about the site around Fort Rozz? If you can find a person who lost their home because of it, get an interview. Finally, we’re doing a more general topic on aliens. They’re here, and here to stay, and if half of the rumourmongers are even remotely correct, we’ll be looking at an executive order to give them amnesty in the near future. I want opinions, politics, _romance_ ; if you can find a way to spin it into _anything_ , it’s something we should consider.”

Cat turned to look more directly at them, pointedly ignoring the low murmur of conversation already as people started spitballing ideas to one another.

“The headline for all of this _will_ be _Stronger Through Adversity_. It’s going to be our quote of the year, our leading theme, and it should be on the front of _every_ magazine that we release this month. Now, who here wants to disappoint me with their ideas first?”

Three quarters of the table raised their hands.

Cat smiled wide and low, an utterly satisfied look on her face. “Alright, let's start with you—fashion! Tell me why I should still be paying you a salary!”

* * *

The Luthor Corp email stared back at her from the separate folder she’d dumped it into. In the tabs of her browser, her thorough research into Lena Luthor as a whole was more or less complete, having gathered something of an image of a woman both from public, carefully-curated perceptions and the more meaningful comments of coworkers and colleagues who were just the smallest bit too open in a public forum.

There was nothing remotely suspicious about her, other than the fact that she was offering her a job. As far as Addy could ascertain, the D.E.O. had not, in fact, released transcripts of her intelligence, and in fact for all government agencies, she was merely known for decent grades in math and a passing specialty in computer sciences. There was nothing in there that should have hinted at the knowledge she had.

The knowledge she even wanted to use.

That’s what kept her coming back to it. Over the course of the day, pecking away at her keyboard as she worked with Winn to run diagnostic checks on the new systems, among other things, she had been persistently drawn back to the offer. A place to actually explore science, to extrapolate on things she knew, it was a tempting thing. She _liked_ CatCo, liked it dearly, liked what it offered her, but it was...

Boring.

She hadn’t quite noticed it at the time, but at some point she had transcended Winn’s own ability to teach her anything. She picked up on computer technology with an ease that Winn had commented - multiple times - on being ‘scary’ and ‘unfair’. Running CatCo’s systems wasn’t a trial for her, it required no extra thinking, she could just do it.

That was what all of the encryption stuff had been about, Winn finding himself thoroughly out of teaching material and just throwing increasingly absurd tasks at her until the very technology itself became a roadblock for further learning.

CatCo should be the obvious choice, remaining in it would keep her around people she cared about, but then that wasn’t going to stay that way. Winn was leaving, joining the D.E.O. if Kara could be believed, and Kara herself was in some sort of odd, transitory state with Cat that she had refused to expand upon when Addy requested information. Something about possibly becoming something more than Cat Grant’s assistant, professionally speaking, but nothing more.

The people she kept in her life, at least at work, were going to have much less time for her. Some were going away, others were in flux, and to be honest while she liked Lucy and tolerated James - because, despite his many annoying habits, he was still a good person - if they were all that was left to draw her to CatCo, it wasn’t anywhere near enough.

Combining that future with the boredom she felt was making it very hard to not consider the offer itself. With entire honesty, Lena should know nothing about her or her capacity. She should have no knowledge of _any_ of this, the entire situation was deeply suspicious, but the possibilities it offered... they were weighty and a little too appealing to dismiss outright.

The main problem with it was that, in searching up Lena Luthor’s history, she’d more generally dipped her toes into the sordid, xenophobic past of the Luthors themselves. Lex Luthor, more specifically, was currently in jail for - at some point before Addy had woken up in Maxwell Lord’s laboratory - briefly turning the sun red in an attempt to kill Clark. What followed was mass, global-scale panic for the period it was red, and the deaths of a countless number of people. At the end of the day, when they had gone looking for evidence, they had found it, and Lex Luthor had been sentenced with 32 life sentences and no chance at parole or bail.

Lena had been the only member of the family to actively speak out against Lex at his hearing, and had been instrumental in getting him put away in the first place. From what reporters could surmise, this had thoroughly damaged her relationship with her mother - adoptive, if her wikipedia page was any indication - and had weathered the legal storm that had followed. Not long after, she had taken full control over Luthor Corp and started plans to rebrand and move out of Metropolis, looking to make a new start elsewhere.

More specifically, she was moving to National City. Addy had, during her short lunch break, checked the building in question, and had spent the time between nipping bites out of her sandwich watching them ease the big new ‘L-Corp’ sign up across the side of the building.

Kara’s opinion would be obvious, if she told her about what she was really considering. A very flat ‘no’ accompanied by a long lecture about the importance of not trusting everyone. There would be no room to argue the case for this possibly being a _good_ thing - especially because the job offer came via recommendation, if the email was to be believed, though recommended by _who_ still remained unclear - and very likely instead become an argument.

Especially because Lena _should not know about her_. The D.E.O. had been, by all accounts, extremely careful in her documentation and scholastic history. Everything was set up to make her appear tremendously average, not raise any flags or draw interest in any meaningful capacity.

Even if Lena was a genuinely decent person, the entire offer could be on the behest of someone else who was threatening her life or in some way using something to control her. There were any number of ways for a good person to be used for ill purposes, she could name three off the top of her head, and there was no shortage of perfectly justifiable reasons to just deny the request and keep doing what she was doing. Addy personally was rather fond of schedules, and was only amenable to change when it was a _good_ change - such as the alterations to her workplace - and it wouldn’t be too hard to just let it go. Pretend she never received it.

But she didn’t want to.

She needed more opinions.

Casting her gaze around in the evening-lit office space, there weren’t too many left. James had left to work on the absurd amount of cover pieces for the upcoming CatCo release, Kara was busy handling some task Cat had given her hours ago, Lucy was dealing with a legal complaint that came up in the meeting several hours ago, and Winn...

...Winn was looking right at her with a curious expression. Their desks were still oriented the same, his up against hers, facing opposite of one another.

“Addy?” Winn asked. “Do you need anything?”

She did, she really did. She gave him a long stare, looked over his features, and was quietly reminded that Winn would almost immediately tell Kara virtually anything that put her in danger. He was a good person like that, but not a good fit for what she needed.

“No,” she lied, finally closing out of the email tabs and already getting a plan together in her head. Winn might not work, neither might Alex, James, Lucy or Kara, but there was someone else she knew who might be significantly more unbiased about the topic. “I was just planning to go and visit an acquaintance of mine.”

* * *

The small group of women, opposite to her on the table, stared vacantly at her as she finished her detailed rundown of exactly what her problem was.

Carol, in the center, looked resigned but otherwise not exactly surprised by the thread of conversation. To her right, Koriand’r - who she had taken a few minutes to become reacquainted with, apparently she’d escaped D.E.O. custody shortly after the crash and had since been bunking with Carol - had her arms folded across her chest, her sporty tracksuit crinkling with each subtle motion, her head tilted to one side in genuine thought. Finally, to her left, Megan was staring right at her, avoiding her eyes, yes, but with little change to her expression.

A table a dozen feet over from them erupted into cheers at the football game being broadcast on one of the screens above the bar, a handful of green-skinned Kosnat - a four-armed species of lizard-like humanoids who grew a layer of symbiotic moss across their bodies for protection, and who ordered their social caste based on moss colouration - ducking out of the way as an accompanying hail of yelled obscenities and actual thrown pieces of food exploded from the other side of the bar.

“Why did you think a group of aliens would be unbiased about a Luthor?” Carol asked once the flurry of intergalactic expletives finally died down into merely a low rumble of discontent. She didn’t sound disappointed, just genuinely curious.

Addy shrugged, her hand cupped around the tall glass of shredded ice they’d gotten her instead of an alcoholic beverage. It was a nice treat to have, if a bit unwieldy and awkward to eat. “Everyone else has worse biases,” she explained matter-of-factly. “Or are affiliated with government agencies who would have more questions about how the information was leaked than they would about Lena Luthor being a prospective boss.”

“You should maybe tell them that she knows about you,” Carol pointed out, voice dry.

“She could’ve gotten it from the recent leak the agency had,” Addy explained, resigned to using vague terminology to not give away the exact specifics of the organization, though from Carol’s expression they probably had something of an idea of who she was talking about. “They still don’t know all that was taken, or who took it in the first place.”

“That’s not much better, Addy,” Megan said in turn, lips pulling down a bit. “If she has contacts with people who sell off secretive government information, she’s probably involved with something bad.”

“I was going to read her mind to check,” Addy admitted, swiping her thumb up and down the condensation that had collected along the glass’s surface.

Megan and Carol, for reasons mostly beyond her, shared a brief look with one another.

“Addy, weren’t you really happy at CatCo?” Carol said instead, finally looking back towards her. “What’s this about?”

Again, she shrugged. “Boredom isn’t...” She wasn’t sure how to phrase it or explain it without giving too much away, without breaking one of Kara’s rules. “It’s not natural, to my kind,” she said, instead, and it was as close to the truth as she could get. “I’m bored all the time, and I want to do something productive.”

“Why not pick up a hobby?” Megan offered.

Addy stared blankly at her. “I don’t know how to.” It was the truth, too, she wasn’t sure if it was just... because of how she was, or if it was actually something she just wasn’t _getting_ yet when it came to human mental processes, but finding a new hobby wasn’t something she had managed to ascertain how to. Things never stuck with her, she would get distracted and bored, and it was only a few things that really caught her attention, and those things would remain that way forever. Geese, Taylor, Kara—those were the focuses of her attention, and she still wasn’t sure how it exactly ended up that way.

“Well,” Megan started again, voice diplomatic. “I won’t say _don’t_ , Addy. This is your decision, and if you think the benefits to your mental health outweigh the potential risks, then certainly go for it. I... _do_ recommend being thorough when you read her mind, though. It’s best not to take risks.”

That earned Megan another bewildered look. “Why wouldn’t I be thorough?”

Carol’s face twisted, looking like she’d just bitten into a lemon rind. “The things in people’s heads are rarely pleasant,” she explained. “People might think one way and act another, that’s normal, but a lot of thoughts can become very... visceral, and it can be difficult to sort through all of that to find what you really need.”

That just sounded like a bad sorting system and inability to reference the information of a thought to the actual context it was being used in. Sometimes she forgot that most forms of telepathy - with the exception of J’onn, as far as she could ascertain - were rather primitive, if powerful.

Carol might’ve seen some of her thoughts on her face - she sincerely had to work on her poker face, it was getting worse day-by-day - as her own twisted up into something like offence. “Your experiences do not count, Addy,” she said, the edge of something like humour in her voice. “I’ve yet to meet a telepath who can’t feel you three blocks over. I’ve gotten used to you, but whatever scale you operate at, the rest of us almost certainly don’t.”

Addy brought her cup up to her lips, opening her mouth to idly shovel a small wad of shredded ice into it. She crushed and chewed, feeling the way it all broke under the pressure of her jaw, and ignored the look of second-hand agony that Koriand’r was wearing and had worn each and every time she had chewed her frozen drink. She still wasn’t sure why Koriand’r was behaving that way, but she didn’t care much either.

Swallowing the watery remains of her drink, Addy bowed her head in acquiescence. “I did not want to say as much, but I’ll keep your weakness in mind.”

“Hey!” Carol yelled in protest.

Addy turned to stare at her, bewildered. “You said it, not me.”

For some reason, that just made Carol start laughing. She clearly still had much to learn about social etiquette, considering the fact that she was coming to learn that Taylor’s own knowledge of such a thing was woefully inadequate.

* * *

The apartment smelled strongly of takeout when she got back.

Kara was tucked up in one seat, a paper box balanced on her knee as she shovelled mouthfuls of rice and chicken into her mouth with one hand while the other reached down to grab and deposit potstickers into her mouth between bites. On the television was the ongoing news coverage of the Fort Rozz wreckage, which had finally been fully tarped over and was now completely surrounded by armed military personnel.

Four buildings around the crash site had been condemned, ostensibly due to ‘foreign energy exposure’, but more likely to keep people roped off from getting vantage points on the site. People around the world were demanding access to it, and America was digging its heels in in the only way it seemed to know how: by selling parts of it off to privatized companies.

Addy would frankly never understand it.

Shutting the door behind her, Addy murmured a greeting towards Kara - who was too busy eating to say hello - and shucked her jacket, draping it over its coat hanger. She slipped out of her shoes, tucking them neatly beneath her jacket, and finally eased her laptop bag over her head, placing it on the dining room table for the time being.

“Hey, Ads,” Kara said after another moment. “You have fun with Carol?”

Not particularly. It had been a professional visit to her confidant, and she couldn’t get the lie that it was anything but to come. Her words just clogged up her throat, she could almost feel the chain of Kara’s necklace weighing her down.

Kara’s eyes flit from the television to her, a worried frown creasing her face. “Did you get into a fight?”

“No,” Addy admitted, fiddling with her shirt as she approached the couch opposite Kara’s chair. “I just discussed something I can’t discuss with you right now.”

Kara paused, working her words over. “Why not?” She asked instead of what Addy had expected—a more direct demand to know.

Her chest fluttered again, warm and sleepy, but it wasn’t time to get relaxed. “Your biases might inform them, and also you might tell Alex, which will bring the D.E.O. into things.”

Kara squinted. “Is it illegal?”

“No.” Not technically, anyway. Lena having her files was a shade of illegal, but that didn’t seem to be what she was asking.

That earned her a shrug. “Then, when it comes time to tell me, we can talk about it in more detail,” she said, after a moment. “But if it’s important enough to withhold from me for now, I’ll respect your privacy. Just...”

A pause.

“Be safe, alright?”

Addy thought back to the email she had sent out on her phone, the one agreeing to the interview. The fact that she was about to take a look through Lena Luthor’s mind, just to be sure she wasn’t hiring her for evil or otherwise harmful purposes. She thought about the delayed notification that’d send an email off to Kara, telling her about the interview, in the event that she didn’t prevent it from sending at least once every twenty-four hours.

“I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consider this thursday's episode early. I'm not happy with it, but it needed to come out, and I managed to finish it before my appointment in an hour.
> 
> This is mostly build-up and stuff, to be fair, but I hope you enjoy.


	29. SEASON 2 - CHAPTER 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy meets Lena for an interview.

* * *

❏ **Jessica Hoang** <J_HOANG@LCORP.COM>

 **To:** AQUEEN_GANDER@OUTLOOK.COM

_Sent 4 day(s) ago_

Good afternoon.

Thank you for replying to our request for an interview. Currently, Ms. Luthor's schedule is packed due to the ongoing move. She has several open spots during this week, however for the 2 weeks after she may be unreachable until after we finalize opening preparations. The dates available are the upcoming Wednesday at 2:00PM, Thursday at either 11:45AM or 6:25PM, or Saturday at 7:40AM.

With regards to your question about who recommended you to us, I have been unable to find the time to ask Ms. Luthor as to the identity of your referrer, so unfortunately you will have to ask her yourself.

The exact job we are offering you is a salaried position as a Research Scientist, working closely on topics related to xeno (or alien) technology and theoretical applications of advanced technology and mathematics with a small, hand-picked team of trusted scientists and researchers. With the upcoming auction sales for portions of the crashed alien vessel, Luthor Corp will be intending to make several acquisitions for study, and the decision to reach out to you was made on the basis of your academics. The starting pay for the position is currently $130,000 per year, with a raise every three which is dependent on your conduct in said position.

Luthor Corp is willing to accommodate disabilities and secondary needs on a case-by-case basis, and we have a 0-strike policy on discrimination. If you decide to join the company, any and all concerns about the language of your peers (e.g: racism, ableism, hostile workplace incidents) should be brought immediately to HR. I have attached a PDF which goes over company conduct policies, as well as baseline accessibility measures our company has taken over the last 4 months.

Regards.

Jessica Hoang

Head Secretary

* * *

❏ **Jessica Hoang** <J_HOANG@LCORP.COM>

 **To:** AQUEEN_GANDER@OUTLOOK.COM

_Sent 3 day(s) ago_

Good morning.

I have put you in for the 6:25PM slot on Thursday, I will see you then.

Yes, the position you are being scouted for is currently paying more than the average for our state. This is due to the unknown nature of the technology that may become available, and also due to the lack of qualified professionals in the US, which is currently temporarily barred from acquiring outside researchers due to UN-related disagreements. It's unclear when these restrictions will be raised, however you will retain your baseline salary in the event that it is.

There is no current required uniform for your position, nor are you expected to wear, to quote, 'professional clothing', however due to the nature of the position, you will likely have to frequently make use of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), which Luthor Corp will be acquiring for staff at no additional cost. I've attached below a PDF going over Luthor Corp branded protective equipment and who we buy it from.

The current head of HR is a woman by the name of Pauleen Moncton, you can find her affiliated listing on the Luthor Corp website's staff page, as well as her credentials.

Luthor Corp works with the government as necessitated, and are not formally affiliated with any government agencies or branches. Over the last 4 months, Miss Luthor has ensured any remaining obligations the company had to the US Military have been completed or otherwise negotiated out of, and have no interest in seeking out closer association with the military or arms manufacturers in the future. Thank you for informing us that Lockheed Martin was releasing press statements saying otherwise, we will be seeking legal counsel if further incidents continue.

You're welcome for the PDF. If you need further information, we have direct links on our website to these PDFs, as company policy has since shifted from remaining opaque about the internal workings and we have instead started progress towards full transparency with our workers.

I wish you a good day.

Jessica Hoang

Head Secretary

* * *

❏ **NOREPLY** <NOREPLY@LCORP.COM>

 **To:** AQUEEN_GANDER@OUTLOOK.COM

_Sent 1 day(s) ago_

This is an automated message to remind you of an upcoming meeting.

Your scheduled meeting with LENA K. LUTHOR, at 6:25PM (18:25) at the LUTHOR CORP BUILDING in NATIONAL CITY, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, will occur in 48 HOURS. Please sign in at the front desk when you arrive to receive a visitor's pass, and follow the instructions given to you.

NOTE: We are currently in the process of moving, so there may be obstructions. In the event that you are blocked from arriving at your meeting, contact one of our staff, who will help you.

Do not reply to this message.

* * *

“Okay, so.” The clerk leaned forward, holding out her hand. In it was a card about the size of a business card, with a stripe of red down the edge and ‘visitor’ written in big black letters across the front. It was sheathed in plastic, and connected to a decent-length lanyard.

Carefully, Addy took it.

“Because we’re still renovating our security systems, we’re only giving out cards with single-floor access,” the clerk explained, tapping her finger against the red stripe. “When you head into the elevators and swipe this, the doors will automatically close and lead you up to your destination, so don’t panic, alright?”

Folding the card further into her palm, Addy nodded.

The clerk - she didn’t know her name, there was no plaque or name tag - smiled brightly her way. “I hope you have a good meeting!”

“Thank you,” Addy said, managing the same brightness as the clerk. It was always good to be polite, and her enthusiasm seemed to be infectious, as the smile the clerk was sending her way broadened just a little bit more.

Stepping away, Addy turned back to her surroundings.

The main lobby of Luthor Corp was many things, at this point in time. First and foremost was that it was large, and had decided on the unfortunately bland decision to make 60% of everything out of glass. The back wall was basically one huge window, the balcony above all of this had glass railings along the overhang, the floor was glossy and made out of light gray tiles, and the walls were painted a mix of metallic, silvery tones and more simple dark gray. The second was that it was clearly unfinished; there were cardboard boxes everywhere, some situated in larger piles, with papers taped to them with labels like ‘terminal A’, ‘security desk 1’, and so on.

It was, well, _bland_ , and messy, somehow at the same time.

Her eyes scanned the walls until they found the elevators, tucked off to the side next to the front doors, next to where the building had set up an impromptu security desk. The security guard manning the desk was staring lazily at the front doors, his hand still grasping the metal detector he’d quickly scanned her down with, what with the lack of larger metal detectors.

Passing by a pot with what looked like a miniature palm tree growing from it, Addy approached the elevators, nodded politely towards the security guard as he turned to look at her, and did her best to avoid coming into contact with any of the people milling around the main foyer. It wasn’t difficult, thankfully, as most of the foot traffic was outside and most of the people inside were working on taking apart the cardboard boxes and putting together anything that was inside.

Technically speaking, as far as she could tell Luthor Corp wasn’t currently open to the public at large. Employees who had been moved from Metropolis to National City to take up new positions, as well as construction crews, and new employees, made up the entirety of the people here. It felt almost odd, like she was in a place she maybe shouldn’t be, but then again that could come down to the fact that she was keeping this from Kara.

Arriving at the elevator, she pressed her thumb into the button.

The door in front of her dinged, then pulled open with an electronic _whirr_ , nearly whisper quiet. The interior of the elevator was glass - no surprise there, it would seem that everything was - and gave a view into the city streets surrounding it. Turning away from it for just a moment, Addy slipped the card back down her hand, caught it between her forefinger and thumb, and gently swiped it through the card reader just next to the rows-upon-rows of elevator buttons.

There was another _ding!_ , bright and cheery, and the highest floor on the list lit up before the doors began to pull shut. The elevator lurched once, stuttering, before it began its ascent.

Addy turned away from the doors, and back towards the open glass she could see out of.

National City’s taste in buildings was something Addy had never been particularly fond of. There was a profound lack of colour as an ever-present theme; mostly steel and glass, with the occasional splash of black - or colours close enough to it - to give some texture to the skyline. Most of the buildings themselves were built in ways that were interesting to look at, sure, appearing as though someone had misaligned a few pieces, but that was about it in terms of positives.

She, of course, knew the building she was in was no different, unfortunately. It was a narrow building, one of the tallest in the area, made to look as though it was built mostly from glass. The roof itself was oddly shaped, resembling an upside-down trapezoid, and the trim of the building was black, and therefore miserably bland.

If nothing else, it fit into the rest of the throng of glassy high-rises and endless office buildings. This was near the city center, after all, evidenced not just by geography but by the fact that, being six o’clock in the evening, it was packed. The sidewalks were a river of people, chattering and making noises. The main street along this part of the city had, at some point before she’d arrived, descended into something like gridlock, and a few people had decided to protest that by leaning on their horns.

It was loud, disorienting, and crowded.

Thankfully she was nowhere near it, so she could only hear it muffled through the walls, unable to fully reach her. She had the misfortune of being right in the midst of that crowd of people on her walk over, and it had been about as fun as one could expect. It’d taken no small amount of effort to resist just giving up the charade altogether and fly over, but then if this was a trap, she needed to be prepared.

Speaking of, Addy tugged on her coreself, adjusting the variables. She wasn’t accessing her power right now, but she also didn’t want to make it patently obvious that she was rummaging through Lena Luthor’s head, which meant taking a less invasive approach. It was one thing to be able to rummage through Maxwell Lord’s brain, it was another altogether to have to do so to what was described as a highly-intelligent woman without making it obvious.

No, she’d have to do a surface-level reading without using Lena’s own brain as the mechanism from which she accessed associated memories. She’d have to rely on her own ability to map and read the brain, which she was relatively confident in, but it was best to do it now rather than later. Fewer distractions meant better results.

Turning away from the window, Addy watched the floors tick up and by, passing twenty, then thirty. They arrived at thirty-eight not long after, the steady climb of the elevator crawling to a stop as it ticked over to thirty-nine. The elevator doors peeled open, revealing a long, uniform white hallway, at the end of which was a pair of doors and a desk.

The woman behind the desk had already turned towards her, and Addy gave her a once over. She was plain-faced, for the most part, with long, straight black hair and carefully applied makeup. She was wearing a simple white blouse and black skirt combo, with her jacket thrown over the back of her chair.

Addy stepped out of the elevator, the doors shutting behind her, and began her approach. The woman’s expression wasn’t hostile, but neither was it cordial, it was acutely suspicious and wary, but not so much that it felt disrespectful. As she approached closer, the plaque on the desk, lit by lights above, became legible: Jessica Hoang.

Oh. The secretary from the emails. Okay.

Arriving at the desk, Addy gently placed the card down on it. “I’m here for my meeting with Miss Luthor,” Addy announced. “We talked over email—the appointment should be for six-twenty?”

Jessica blinked at her for a moment, eyes scanning over her person. “Adeline Queen?” she queried, still sounding reluctant.

Addy nodded. “I prefer Addy.”

“Right,” Jessica breathed, reaching up to scrape a hand through her hair. “Sorry, you’re just not what I was expecting—I’ll page Miss Luthor to tell her you’re here, please...” She trailed off, eyes scanning the mostly empty space of the hallway for a moment. “Find a place to stand, we don’t have seats set up yet.”

She could do that. Nodding resolutely, Addy marched herself over to the other side of the hallway, leaning her back up against it. She toyed with her pockets for a time, playing with the idea of texting Winn to pass the time, but abandoned it. It was probably for the best that she keep her attention in-the-now, just to avoid any potential attempts on her life or something like it. She truly didn’t feel like Lena Luthor, from what she had researched, would do something like that, but then she could never be too careful.

Silence crept back in, growing loud in her ears. Jessica’s fingers, behind her desk, tapped quickly across a clicky-clacky keyboard, clunky and heavy with enough percussive force to make it sound like she really had to work for each press. A clock above the desk, misaligned just enough to be noticeable, ticked on, showing the time was six-nineteen PM.

There was the click of heels against hard flooring, drawing her attention towards the door. The clicking grew louder, a confident stride echoing until, finally, the left door out of the pair clattered and was pushed open. The top half of a person peeked through the gap, and Addy was briefly struck by her appearance.

Lena Luthor was, she’d known from the internet, a woman of contrast. Brunette hair so dark it was nearly black, with alabaster skin untouched by blemishes or freckles, and sea glass-green eyes. Her favourite type of lipstick appeared to be cherry and crimson red, the latter of which painted her lips a sharp, striking shade against the colour of her skin. She had a squarish jaw, but it suited her well, giving a sort of striking definition to her features that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

Lena’s clothing was opulent and clearly well-made. Currently, she was wearing a lot of black: a black, long-sleeved shirt with a high neck, a black pencil skirt, and what looked like black stilettos.

“Adeline Queen?” Lena called out, her eyes flicking rapidly over her features, like she was looking for something.

Addy blinked out of her haze of observation, beginning to tug on her power, rousing it from its sleep. “I prefer Addy,” she said, feeling the slow burn of solar energy as she diverted her body’s resources towards powering up the connection.

“Addy, then,” Lena replied, a smile smoothing over her features. Her eyes flicked up, trying to catch Addy’s eyes, but she was much too quick to fall victim to that, glancing off to the side before she could. “I’m Lena Luthor. Call me Lena, please, if I’m calling you Addy.”

Lena pushed the door open wider, revealing the huge, wall-sized windows just behind her. “Would you like to come in?”

Her power clicked on, purring to life, and she directed it towards Lena, keeping it away from the possibly intrusive thoughts of the secretary. A torrent of information started to flicker at the fringes of her awareness, memories plucking like strings as she started to map out the full breadth of her brain.

It was a bit startling, but Lena had a very structured consciousness and memory. Very neat, very orderly, more orderly than she was used to when it came to people. Still, she tucked it away for the time being, keeping part of her attention on it as she began to map and delve for relevant topics.

“Thank you,” Addy said, for lack of a better word to use, stepping forward and reaching out with her remaining arm to capture the door, pushing it further open. Lena’s eyes lingered intrusively on her stump, but she ignored it, knowing that everyone gave it at least a look. Everyone had questions, after all.

Lena led her further in without saying much else, to her own relief. There was a short hallway that led into the office itself, which opened up into a wide, long space, with the entire north-facing wall being made out of glass. Lena’s desk itself was at the eastern end of the office, although the office itself wasn’t much to look at. There weren’t any chairs, or couches, or really anything more than the bare necessities, the rest of the office being predominantly taken up by yet more labelled cardboard boxes, stacked one on top of the other.

Her power rippled. A hit, then. She tugged on it, drew the memory to the surface, and experienced in an instant the brief, awkward and stilted conversation Lena Luthor had with Maxwell Lord. It came with a small burst of extra information—Maxwell had been close friends with Lex Luthor, but had pulled away once he started to gain a reputation for being obsessive. Maxwell knew Lena in passing, but not so much in person, as they operated in different circles, but she had a healthy respect for his drive, if a wariness towards how he generally behaved.

Lena also thought that she was Maxwell Lord’s bastard child.

...Which, she wanted to correct. She’d even opened her mouth for a moment to do so, but it struck her at about the same time that if she did, Lena would know that she had been prying, or at least have suspicions. Unless Lena brought the topic up herself, there was no feasible way for her to contradict the claim.

She shut her mouth with a click.

Lena arrived at her desk, strutting around it and levering herself back down into the big, cushy black leather chair, letting out a sigh of relief. “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she drawled, a sheepish smile tugging at her lips. “We’ve been working to unpack everything, but it’s only been a day and most people have to sleep. You can sit down on a box if you want, or remain standing, it’s up to you.”

She reoriented her power, fishing for relevant information for what Lena thought about her. Her power quieted back down to a murmur, resuming its scan once again.

“I’ll stand,” Addy said, because none of the boxes looked particularly inviting or comfortable.

“Alright then,” Lena said, still smiling. “By the way, lovely clothes, I like the colours.”

Addy glimpsed down at herself, feeling an odd, happy tug at her chest. She liked them too. She was wearing a canary-yellow t-shirt, white pants that were made to look like jeans but felt nothing like them, a pair of red hightops, and her favourite wine stain red hat. “Thank you,” she said, a smile slipping across her face as she glanced back up towards Lena.

“It’s no problem, truly, it’s good that you can express yourself—what a _faux pas_ it would be if I wore something like that,” Lena said, humour both in her tone and in her expression. Addy had gotten especially good at picking out humour as of late, she was proud of that. “But, nevertheless, we have something important to talk about.”

“The interview,” Addy agreed, shuffling a bit closer so she didn’t feel like she was standing at one end of the office and Lena at the other. “May I ask who recommended me?” She knew it was Maxwell now, but it was still good as a test. Her power hadn’t gotten any responses from the mental mapping about opinions of Addy herself—not a surprise, scanning meant to be this noninvasive couldn’t go pulling at associated mental threads to find things, and she had only just met Addy. It was likely that she didn’t _have_ much of an opinion, and that itself pointed towards this being made in good faith.

Or, well, at least as much good faith as anything involved with Maxwell Lord _could_ be. At least now she had at least a rough idea on who could’ve been responsible for the D.E.O. leaks, though why exactly he had been pushing for Lena to hire her still wasn’t something she totally understood, but then she already understood very little of Maxwell Lord in the first place. He was a complicated, very unpleasant man.

“I’m sorry,” Lena said, and actually sounded like it. A quick glimpse over her hormone levels even _pointed_ towards her being genuine about that apology too. That was very, very odd. “A confidentiality agreement prevents me from doing so, but I can assure you, the person who recommended you to me did so with your best intentions in mind.”

A ripple from her power. She tugged on it, siphoned off a copy of the acquired information, and pushed it through her coreself to be processed. Lena had already clearly developed a unique picture of her: she hadn’t been lying about her opinions on the colours, she was very glad that Addy could express herself in such a way, but thought that it pointed towards a potential developmental disorder of some kind. Weird, but whatever. She thought Addy was awkward, was curious about how she lost her arm but knew better than to ask, and had extrapolated from the testing files she’d read that Addy was likely very intelligent in a specific field.

She wasn’t wrong, but then her grasp on the scope of things wasn’t completely right, either.

Still, had she had any malicious intent for Addy, it would’ve been there. She could probe for more of her thoughts on aliens, but again, had any been there, she could’ve drawn that from opinions of herself. She didn’t know Addy was an alien, didn’t know a lot, actually, and was now completely convinced Addy was the estranged, illegitimate child of Maxwell Lord and some unspecified woman.

She really needed to find a way to clarify that she wasn’t, but that was for later. The thought was making her feel vaguely ill.

“It’s okay,” Addy said, and didn’t even lie this time. She tugged on her power, starting to peel it off of Lena’s consciousness, folding it back into herself after another few moments. “I understand.”

Lena relaxed, and her power recorded something like bitterness and empathy spiking in her mind before the connection broke entirely. She wondered what about this situation was particularly relatable for Lena, but then she could always reconnect to her later to find out. As of now, since she’d ascertained that this wasn’t an attempt on her life, she should probably treat this as a potential job, rather than an investigation.

“Jess - my secretary - already informed me you know about part of the reason why we’re on such a hiring spree for sufficiently qualified researchers in practical fields,” Lena started up again, folding both of her hands politely in front of her, on the desk. “Would that be right?”

Addy nodded.

“Good. I’d like to make more clarifications now that I’m here. For starters, Luthor Corp has come into an agreement with the US government to abstain from buying or even bidding on weapon-related technology. Most of what we’ll be bidding on is computer technology and other odds and ends that don’t, in their eyes, qualify. None of this tech will go to making weapons, either, so rest assured, I am not like my brother.” Something about the way she finished that statement was heavy, thick with intent, but Addy still couldn’t unravel the mixture of repressed tones and expressions to get anything out of it. Maybe she should’ve kept the telepathic link open, but then she hadn’t wanted to go wasting solar energy for no good reason, even if it was replenishable. “Your work, as a researcher, would be primarily about translating alien technology into formats we understand or, failing that, learning how to replicate and modify it. Otherwise, your focus is on the advanced technology of our company in general. You’d be working on a larger team that I used to lead, but is now led by Emil Hamilton.”

There were opportunities here. She’d seen some of the extents that technology could reach when she’d salvaged what she could from Indigo. The Coluan might be one of the highest ends of technology, but their abilities were a product of a galaxy-wide trade of high-tech equipment, building and extrapolating on itself. She craved to understand more of it, it was part of her nature, she’d come to accept that, especially with the ongoing difficulties at work, where each day without something to distract herself with tended to drag on without end.

“You have flexible hours, as you need them,” Lena continued, glancing towards her more directly. She didn’t try for eye contact again, but then it was a close thing. She watched Lena retrieve a package of papers from her desk, flipping them open and sorting through the pages. “The contract is relatively conventional—forty-hour work week, two weeks of sick leave, full health coverage with our associated insurance agency. You’re an exempt worker due to making over the federal maximum—here, would you like a look?”

Addy stared at the sheets for a time, carefully pacing forward until she could take them from Lena. The woman smiled at her for a moment, before motioning for Addy to read. She flipped through the package, thumbing the pages and going over the various aspects of the job. The things in place for those with disabilities, a competitive healthcare plan, good pay, potentially long hours, but nevertheless worthwhile. Plenty of NDAs and a lot of words meaning ‘we can ruin your life if you sabotage your own work’, but, as she had said, nothing out of the norm.

“I’m not sure if I want to work here, yet,” Addy admitted, glancing back up.

Lena stared at her, and Addy in turn stared back. With all of her contrast, her red lips and bright green eyes, she really stood out starkly against everything. Against herself, against the minimalist white office, against the glass and the fading reds and oranges along the horizon. She was the centrepiece of the room, and Addy actually rather liked the look of it.

“That’s okay,” Lena said simply, reaching off to one side to pull a business card from a stack of them. She quickly jotted her name and number on the back, before sliding it across to her. “I’ll be honest, just from what I’ve observed, you have the job if you want it, Addy. I’ll need you to contact me within 10 days, as we intend to start work soon and while a small delay is easy to overcome, I do need someone with your knowledge on the team as it stands. If you’re unwilling, I can find someone else, if you aren’t...”

She tapped the card.

“Contact me. Keep the contract, maybe get someone to look over it with you if you want—everything is above board.” Lena looked at her then, and Addy could’ve sworn it was almost hopeful. “I don’t know you yet, or might ever, I do have to run this company, but I can assure you, the team you might join is full of people I trust, and they would all be excited to have you on it.”

Again, Addy couldn’t help shake the feeling that this speech wasn’t entirely for her. It felt like Lena was saying something she wanted to hear, something she needed to hear, it was in her tone, the slight wistfulness in it. She was getting a lot better at reading things like that, but the entire situation was charged enough to overcome whatever barriers she might have in understanding intent.

Addy shuffled the package beneath her arm and took the card, flipping it over to stare at the front of it.

Finally, she glanced around, finding a small box a bit away from the others, but close enough to the desk that it didn’t feel impersonal. She wandered over to it and sat down, ignoring Lena’s curious look for a moment.

She wanted this. It was... odd. She didn’t want to do things she already knew how to do, and the possibility of gaining access to alien tech was interesting.

It could be a way that she could fix her power problems, too. Maybe that was why she was getting so fixated on it, why it was such a tempting offer.

“Can you tell me about what the research team might want to work on?” Addy asked, instead.

Lena smiled. “Only some things, but I’ll try.”

* * *

She arrived back home by eight, head swimming with new ideas. She had been Lena’s last meeting for the day, which had let the conversation stretch on a bit longer than the actual amount of time she had allotted. Lena had turned out to be an incredibly intelligent person, a touch like Winn, almost _too_ intelligent when compared to the humans from her last universe. Then again, maybe she simply hadn’t met enough humans from that universe who might qualify.

Twisting the knob on the door, the wad of papers still stuffed under her armpit, Addy eased the apartment door open. Inside, she spotted Kara, stretched out across the couch in a lazy fashion, head turned her way. The television was turned to the Food Network, and someone was currently halfway to tears trying to use a blender to make what looked like sausage meat.

Weird.

“I’m home,” Addy announced, as had become habit, slipping the door shut behind her and locking the door. Kara’s responding “ _welcome back_ ” echoed out as she was slipping her feet out of her shoes and depositing her hat on the rack, all of which was surprisingly difficult when she had to balance the wad of papers under one arm. At least the business card had been small enough to just slip into the pocket of her pants, but she’d had no such luck contorting the contract into a storable size.

“So,” Kara said, voice pitched to carry. “Was that your thing you couldn’t tell me about?”

Addy turned her way, scuffing the heel of her socked feet against the floor. “Yeah.”

“You gonna tell me about it now?” Kara asked.

Addy nodded.

Kara pushed herself upright, patting the place where her legs used to be. “C’mon then.”

Addy just hoped she wasn’t about to get angry. Still, she trudged over, watching Kara quickly use the remote to mute the television, and finally tucked the contract out from beneath her armpit and hand it wordlessly over to Kara as she eased herself into the seat next to her.

For a moment, it was just silence and the ambient body heat Kara radiated. Addy didn’t do the same thing, she ran almost a little cold in comparison to Kara or Clark, not that she ever felt particularly cold. Kara was always a bit like a sun, radiating outward.

“Luthor Corp,” Kara stated, voice utterly emotionless.

So, she was mad. She knew that type of repressed voice wasn’t normal on anyone else but her. “They offered.”

“...A hundred thousand—yikes, okay,” Kara breathed out, emotion trickling back into her voice. “That might’ve been worth the risk, though do you even really care about money?”

“Resources are nice,” she replied in turn, which wasn’t a lie. “I do enjoy the serotonin spike that comes with watching my bank account accrue capital, but otherwise no.”

Kara glanced away from the paper, staring at her. “Are you saving up for something?”

Addy blinked. “What would I save up for?”

“Well,” Kara fumbled, eyes flicking back towards the pages. “A human-sized goose plushy or something? I think IKEA sells one.”

Why nobody had told her something like that existed, she wasn’t sure, but she’d be looking into that. “I did not know that existed, I thought IKEA was a furniture retailer.”

“They’re a lot of things,” Kara said absently, her entire posture stiffening. “Wait, wait, you met _Lena Luthor?_ ”

There was the anger. “Yes.”

“Without backup,” Kara said, each word slow to come out. “Without _telling_ any of us. What if this was all a trap?!”

“I had contingencies,” Addy said, opting to defend herself. “An email would have been sent, had I not prevented it, in twenty-one hours from now to everyone’s emails detailing my entire situation and everything involving Lena Luthor. I also had Carol promise me that she would track me down if I went missing, though I still don’t know how exactly.”

“So, what, you went up there with only that? Addy you could’ve—you could’ve ended up in Cadmus!” Kara threw her unoccupied arm up, the other one keeping a stranglehold on the wad of papers. “This could still be a trap!”

“I read her mind,” Addy blurted.

Kara froze.

Addy froze.

“...And?” Kara said, sounding a bit more curious than she probably should be.

“She thinks I’m Maxwell Lord’s bastard child—”

Kara spluttered. “Language!”

“English,” Addy confirmed, prompting yet more splutters. “She also thinks I am weird, but enjoyable to be around, and felt genuinely sorry she was prevented from telling me Maxwell Lord was the one to recommend me. Also, he’s responsible for the leaks, I believe.”

“So they’re working together?” Kara said, breathing heavily, clearly trying to compose herself.

Addy shook her head. “Lena thinks he’s a creep.”

For _whatever_ reason, that startled a bark of laughter out of Kara.

“Rao,” Kara finally choked out after a long series of chortles, her fingers letting go of the papers as they fell into her lap. She reached up with one hand, massaging her brow. “It says something when _Lex Luthor’s_ little sister thinks you’re a creep. Cripes, Addy, you don’t make this sort of thing easy, do you? Do you want to leave CatCo?”

Addy paused, thinning her lips out into a line. She twiddled her thumb, rolling them against the rounded joint of her knee and hummed a little bit. She tried to think of a way to put this, of a way to make this blow hurt less hard.

“It’s boring,” she said, instead, after finding no way to cushion the blow. “Winn has taught me everything he can, most of my day involves deleting pornography off of server files and ensuring nobody is using our wi-fi to torrent movies. I can do it, but I’m finding it tiring.”

A sigh gusted out past Kara’s lips. “I guess I can see that—Winn always had other projects going on to keep himself occupied. I... I don’t, I like seeing you in the office, Addy. It’s nice to know you're safe, but I need to know, would this be more interesting to you?”

Addy blinked, not expecting that. She stared at Kara’s expression for a moment, a mask of sincerity and calm, trying to gauge what was on it, and finding nothing other than acceptance. “It would be,” she admitted again, eyes dropping back down to her hand. “I like seeing you too, but... this could help me find a way to regain more power, it could be interesting, and she wants _me_.”

Maybe that was what it had been, this entire time. Despite the dubious way she’d been recruited in the first place, Lena had decided she wanted her as part of that team. Not because of nepotism, not because of anything like that—had she played to the letter of the agreement instead of the soul, she could’ve very easily offered Addy _any_ job. Janitor, secretary, security guard, and have fulfilled her agreement to Maxwell. But instead, she’d looked at what Addy knew, and decided _I want that._

It was odd, being wanted.

An arm tucked itself around her shoulders, pulled her into a side hug, tight as can be. Kara smelled faintly like perfume, and Addy let herself melt into the soft embrace, cheek resting against her shoulder.

“I don’t like this,” Kara admitted, in turn. “I don’t like that you did this without any backup, but I understand why you might’ve been afraid of having this opportunity taken from you. I... I would honestly prefer it if you stayed at CatCo, but I’m not going to stop you, Addy.”

The hug grew tighter, Addy let her eyes shut and just listened to the slow, steady beat of Kara’s heart.

“You’re another family member that could be hurt by a Luthor,” Kara explained tightly, quietly. “Clark—he was _so_ paranoid about Lex, all the time. Always worried it would be one wrong step and his life would be ripped away from him. I... I can relate, you know?”

Krypton, exploding behind her eyes.

Addy tried to dismiss the memory.

“But, I understand that you’re independent,” Kara explained, the hug loosening. Addy peeked her eyes open, glimpsing Kara’s pursed lips. “And I understand that CatCo might not be stimulating for you, which... if it’s causing you mental distress, then it’s totally okay for you to move to another job. I need you to be safe, though, okay? Promise me that if _anything_ becomes squirrely, you’ll tell me or someone at the D.E.O.”

Addy nodded, though it was more of a nuzzle. “Okay.”

Kara maneuvered the papers off of her lap, placing them down on the table in front of them. The hug loosened, the tight press giving way to full-body tingles, hypersensitive nerves jumping and jolting at a moment’s notice. She felt herself grow calmer, more relaxed and loose.

“I’m going to tell Alex, though,” Kara said.

Addy froze, a protest on her lips.

Kara just shot her a quailing look. “Don’t. She has to know about this, she’s family, I won’t tell Clark because, well, he’ll be around soon anyway. That and I think he’ll go gray if I do. But she deserves to know, okay?”

“What if she gets angry?” Addy asked after another moment. She didn’t like it when people got angry, couldn’t help the feeling of panic and fear.

Kara shrugged. “Then she gets angry. Addy, people being upset with you—it’s not, well, it’s not like how I was on red kryptonite, okay?”

Addy swallowed, but managed to nod. “Okay. I trust you.”

* * *

“Miss Grant?” Addy asked.

It was early, early enough that she wasn’t due in for several hours. She’d come with Kara, however, who had already scurried off for reasons unclear.

Cat Grant, in her chair, glanced up at her from the small collection of semi-translucent pages on the desk. “Addy,” she greeted warmly, motioning for her to come in. Addy slipped in through the gap between the glass doors, letting them ease shut behind her. “What can I do for you?”

Addy glanced back behind her, catching sight of Kara emerging from the stairs, catching her eye. Kara just smiled at her, a bittersweet smile, but a smile nonetheless, and gave her a thumbs-up.

Turning back towards Cat, Addy smoothed her hand down against her pant leg. “I, uhm, may be leaving this job for another.”

Cat Grant blinked, a bit of a surprised look on her face. “I was wondering when this might happen,” she said, a bit of a sigh on her lips. “Earlier than I expected, but not too much—come here, sit down.”

It wasn’t a command, she knew that. The way the words were spoken was silky-smooth, gentle, but with something like pride in it. Addy shuffled forward, arriving at one of the seats and slipping into it.

“Now, you’re currently hired as a junior IT tech. I had intended to elevate you into Winn Schott’s position, now that he’s leaving for a job with the government, though clearly I’m going to have to find a new technician to take over for the both of you, hopefully one with even a portion of your capabilities. Don’t tell the cardigan-wearing menace I said that, though.” Cat levelled a look at her, almost playful, but tinged with something serious. “He already has a big enough head when it comes to his gadgets, it’s best not to add any more hot air, it might pop.”

That was an unpleasant bit of mental imagery

“I did always expect for you to move on—I am not a fool, you learn things at a rate which would make most burned-out gifted children green with envy,” Cat continued, unaware of Addy’s dilemma. “I wasn’t sure what it would be, to be fair, boredom or something else catching your fixation. It doesn’t really matter, either. Let me ask, though, will you have protection for your needs?”

The tone she was using was... gentle. This wasn’t a Cat Addy was wholly used to. Cat had always been a careful blend of acerbic, clever, and caring. This was mostly caring, with only a little bit of cleverness. It felt nice, she wanted to bask in the intense care she’d been receiving from others, soak up that positive attention like a sponge, but got a stranglehold on it before she could let the impulse become any more than that: an impulse.

“They do,” she said, at last. “I don’t have to disclose—”

“Which,” Cat cut in. “You should never feel obligated to, Addy. They are not warranted any amount of information about you that you are not comfortable sharing.”

Addy nodded.

“Continue,” Cat said, belatedly.

“I don’t have to disclose anything, but my talk with the interviewer went over what I had available for me. Also what my expectations are, most of which I can handle.” She paused, shifting her hand across her lap again, just to feel the bumpy texture of her khakis. “I’ll miss it here,” she admitted reluctantly.

“It’s okay to outgrow this place, Addy,” Cat said, a smile plucking at her lips. “You have limitations, we all do, but some more so than others. If this was your first step, then it was your first step. I’m doing much the same with Kara—don’t tell her this, but I’m relatively sure she’s going to choose to be a reporter. She’s currently working to find a worthwhile replacement as a secretary, though frankly she could ask to go into marketing and I’d give her it. She deserves it, and so do you.

“Which, speaking of, who are you potentially going to work for? Did Google offer you anything? I had heard from Kara they were accosting Winn after he was involved in whatever those hack marathon things he likes so much are.”

“A salaried position as a researcher at Luthor Corp, working in a small team overseen by mostly Lena Luthor herself.”

Cat stared at her for a moment, clearly trying to process. “The pay?”

“One hundred and thirty grand.”

Cat sucked in a breath. “You could’ve led with that, Addy, I would understand. We’re paying you minimum wage here.”

She shrugged. “I don’t care much about money, though resources are nice to have.” A lot of people seemed to behave weirdly about that figure, now that she thought about it. Kara, Cat, and Alex, whose entire rant had died off when Kara had mentioned it just this morning. Alex had ambushed the two of them with donuts and Kara had blurted the entire situation out in nearly ten seconds.

It had been loud. Alex had tried to conscript her into spying on Luthor Corp for them, though Addy had neither refused nor accepted the offer. Mostly because it was a risk, and Lena had seemed so interested in her that it had felt a lot like a betrayal to do something like that.

“Are you sure you’re not related to Oliver Queen?” Cat questioned, tilting her head.

What. “Who?”

“A very wealthy manwhore,” Cat answered succinctly.

There was a loud _bang_. Addy twisted around, catching sight of Kara with her head up against a now visibly dented wall, having spilled what looked like several pounds worth of files across the floor. Winn was already at her side, trying to help her clean up, but Kara’s gaze was focused on Cat Grant and Addy, looking utterly scandalized.

“She’s really not that good at hiding it,” Cat mused. “I used to make a game out of making suggestive comments and see how she’d react. One time she dropped several stacks of chairs down the stairs because of it.”

Addy glanced towards her, brows wrinkling. “That feels like bullying.”

“Teasing,” Cat replied glibly. “She must think I’m an awful influence on you, but my _lord_ is it ever funny. I still can’t be sure if the clumsiness is a bit or not, because in moments like these I’m pretty sure she’s just like that most of the time.”

Another glance towards Kara showed that a heavy flush of red had started to crawl its way up her neck, as she was clearly hearing every last thing they were saying. She looked so embarrassed it was almost embarrassing by proximity somehow, though she still wasn’t sure exactly how that was possible. Sympathetic emotional responses were weird.

“Oh, but, yes. We have a contract to talk about, don’t we? I am paying you hourly, how long will you have until you want to change jobs?” Cat’s eyes were back on her again.

Addy shrugged. “Under ten days, possibly a little longer if the situation can be explained to Lena Luthor.”

“That’s a bit short notice but—well, best to use my _super_ ”—the stress on the word there was all humour, almost mischievous—“assistant before I get one with significantly less stopping power. I’m sure Kara can figure that out, too.”

She could hear Kara’s groan, even from behind the glass walls of Cat’s office.

* * *

❏ **Gatorade Support** <GSUPPORT@PEPSICO.COM>

 **To:** AQUEEN_GANDER@OUTLOOK.COM

_Sent less than 1 day(s) ago_

Hello,

Thank you for your suggestions! We take pride in our community's ability to come together to help improve our products.

Unfortunately, while we found your suggestion for the bottles very inspiring, and very interesting, we currently have no plans to implement it or anything like it. Our team particularly enjoyed the mock-up image you sent along with it, and agree that having a scaled texture along the bottle would be very delightful.

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* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing Lena in this situation is... hard.
> 
> The intent here, obviously, is for Lena to be sympathizing with Addy. A girl trying to strike out on her own, but who needs help--she's 'stuck' in a dead-end tech job, and Lena can sort of empathize. This genius, being barred behind something as mundane as CatCo? Perish the thought. Of course, that opinion is... mostly wrong? Addy's doing things because she wants to, but Lena doesn't know that. She just sees Addy, who might need some help.
> 
> Which, obviously that dynamic will change with time, but aside from this rocky start, here's the chapter! I hope you enjoyed.


	30. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy meets new colleagues and makes a new acquisition.

Alex had joined them for breakfast today. Not unexpectedly, to be fair, today was the day she was officially starting her job at Luthor Corp - or, as a company memo had implied, soon-to-be L-Corp - though to what extent her first day would actually amount to anything was rather vague. The email Lena had sent out to her had implied it was more of a meet-and-greet, the day they all went to acquaint themselves with one another and establish team goals, but little else, as evidenced by the fact that she wasn't expected to stick around for very long, maybe one o'clock at the latest.

Still, joined them she had, and brought with her what, Addy was starting to realize, was probably a peace offering. An entire box of donuts for Kara, most of which looked the sort of sickly-sweet that made Addy’s toes curl by sheer proximity, and a small box full of delightfully crunchy baby carrots, celery, and a small tub of hummus for herself.

‘Peace offering’ was the operative word here, too. To say that Alex had been unimpressed with her decision to shuck safety and enter the employ of Lena Luthor would be vastly underselling it. She hadn’t exploded, as Addy had expected her to, nor yelled at her, but for the first couple of days after Kara told her about it, the disappointment had rolled off her in waves whenever she came to visit.

She wasn’t sure _why_ , mind you. Addy had taken all the right precautions and had even scanned Lena Luthor for malicious intent, but then Alex had problems with paranoia like Taylor had. The two of them were awfully similar like that, treating paranoia not as irrational speculation that tended to cascade out and swallow everything even remotely related to it, but rather more like a hobby, or a lifestyle choice.

Efficient when you have to protect someone or something from anything that had the potential to be a threat.

Less so when it was used to undermine or _imply_ that her telepathy was anything but perfect.

Stuffing another carrot into her mouth, Addy kept her gaze firmly locked on the screen of her laptop. The new guy Kara had found for CatCo’s IT needs was... _decent_ , to name a word for it. Good enough, might be another term. He wasn’t even remotely close to either Winn or herself in terms of technical ability, but as far as she’d been able to ascertain from the last few reports she was contractually obligated to check over, he was doing his job and well enough that she didn’t need to worry about the servers crashing.

“So,” Kara said, mouth still half full of sugary dough, muffling it a bit, but nonetheless relaying enough awkwardness in her tone to draw Addy’s attention away from her computer. “First day, huh?”

““Don’t talk with your mouth full,”” Addy said at the same time Alex did. She sent a look Alex’s way, avoiding her eyes but catching her attention, before looking back towards Kara.

Thankfully, Kara did in fact heed their request and swallowed thickly. “Sorry, these are just _so_ good—where’d you get them, anyway?”

“I don’t know, actually,” Alex admitted, heat colouring her cheekbones a little. “J’onn got them for me when I asked, said they were the best he ever had.”

Turning away from Kara and towards the box, Addy reached out to ease the lid down a little, ignoring Kara’s noise of protest as immediate access to her food was cut off. The words ‘Pedro’s Pastries’ were written across the top lid in Portuguese, though there wasn’t much else to help identify where exactly in the 9 majority-Portuguese speaking countries that bakery might be, if it was even in one of those at all.

She flipped the lid back up, and Kara did not delay in snatching another donut, shooting her what she now knew was a faux-wounded look, rather than one which actually conveyed any amount of outrage.

“It’s Portuguese,” Addy supplied after a moment, once she noticed both Alex and Kara were staring at her expectantly. “Pedro’s Pastries. Maybe try googling it?”

Kara nodded enthusiastically at her, forcing the donut into her mouth with a noise Addy would’ve rather never heard come from her. Said opinion about Kara’s noises, going by her grossed out features, seemed to be shared by Alex.

“Def’nit’ly g’nna—”

““Swallow,”” Alex and Addy, again, demanded in unison. Twice in one morning, that was very odd.

Kara pouted, or maybe tried to, Addy wasn’t sure. Her face just twisted up, muscles twitching in certain ways that should’ve conveyed a pout, but made her instead look like she was suffocating or about to puke, possibly both. After a few moments of being stared at, Kara seemed to concede to the demand for decent table manners, finishing her chewing before swallowing with an audible _gulp_.

“I’m definitely going to track it down,” Kara repeated, much more clearly this time around. “Speaking of, how’s J’onn anyway?”

“Busy,” Alex said dryly. “Harper apparently put into motion a lot of really extreme anti-alien policies that were automated, so now he has to revert all of that, as well as rehire two-dozen agents who Harper fired after the standoff with General Lane.”

“Wait,” Kara started, hand inching towards the box of donuts again. “If Harper fired everyone else, why didn’t he fire you? Not that I’m complaining, but you’re kinda _known_ for being my liaison at the D.E.O.”

Alex’s face twisted up in distaste, as though she had bitten into a lemon.

Addy stuffed another carrot in her mouth. Crunchy.

“I think he wanted in my pants?” Alex said, not sounding completely convinced by the notion.

Kara’s hand jumped away from the honey-glazed donut it was about to pick up as though it had suddenly been lit on fire, her body bowing over as she gagged theatrically. “Alex!” She actually _did_ sound wounded this time. “I didn’t need to know that! I was _eating_!”

“You asked!” Alex retorted just as loudly.

Addy tabbed over to Youtube, briefly switching to one of her bookmarked playlists.

“Not for the details!” Kara wailed, tone thick with disgust. “Isn’t he like, in his fifties? Doesn’t he have a _wife?_ ”

“That’s what makes it gross!” Alex said in return.

Kara threw her hands up. “Then why did you—”

Addy clicked on the link, and the room was shortly thereafter filled with the sound of a goose honking its little heart out.

Both heads swivelled towards her.

With great purpose, she reached over, kept her gaze levelled mostly in the direction of Alex and Kara, and picked up a carrot. Still holding their general attention, she plopped it into her mouth, bit down, and crunched it into pulp. She swallowed, muted the video, and, unlike other people at the table, adhered to the basic propriety expected of a family when having a meal together.

“No fighting,” she said primly.

Alex blinked.

Kara just stared.

“Did you just—was that, do you have _goose_ videos for this purpose?” Alex said, for whatever reason sounding very, very startled by the notion.

Addy levelled what she was hoping was a disappointed stare at Alex, who almost quailed beneath it. “Of course I do,” she replied easily, clicking out of the video and returning to her ‘interruption sounds’ playlist. “It’s worthwhile being prepared.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Kara mouth ‘ _for what?_ ’ at Alex, who in turn merely shrugged, looking confused.

Nobody ever understood her genius.

Dropping the last few carrots into her mouth, Addy spared another glance at the clock. “I’m going to need to go soon,” she announced, easing the lid of her laptop shut. She was already dressed - a professional mix of a neon-green shirt, cherry-red pants, canary-yellow shoes, and she was going to pair it off with her aqua-blue jacket currently hanging next to the door - and ready to go for the most part.

“I—okay, sorry. I just,” Kara’s words fumbled, trailed off awkwardly. The tension that had been sitting in the back of this entire situation started to weigh down more and more, and Addy wasn’t particularly fond of it.

She started putting her laptop into its bag, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure the source of it, nor what exactly she was uncomfortable about. She just _was_.

With a breath, Kara seemed to collect herself. “Addy?”

She glanced her way.

“I’ll always support you,” Kara continued, smiling gently. “I— _we_ ”—Alex nodded at the edges of her vision—“just worry about you, sometimes. If this is what you want to do, then we're totally behind you. Which was what Alex was _trying_ to get across. I just, I guess I’m feeling a bit lonely, too? You and Winn are going to be gone, and it’s... it just won’t be the same at CatCo.”

Pausing, Addy glanced towards the two of them. Sincerity stared back at her, not even concealed by the fact that she had come to learn she was particularly bad at reading faces. After a moment, she nodded, fiddling with the strap to her bag as she eased it up onto the table itself. She’d have to put her coat on first, if she didn’t want to have a strap underneath it, which she very much did not. Especially considering her suit was in there, and it would be an endless annoyance to get it out if she was wearing something over it.

Really, it probably might be better to start calling her ‘laptop bag’ just her _bag_ , since it had become something of a container for everything from her wallet to her costume to a lot of other things. She didn’t normally bring her costume around with her, to be fair, but considering she’d been too swamped to do what she needed to do over the last couple of days, she was going to need it after work.

“I’ll beat up Luthor if she’s evil, though,” Alex added.

Kara nodded rapidly. “Me too!”

At least, Addy thought, they could agree on that much. If Lena Luthor was evil, she would likely receive a suitable amount of physical violence to hopefully discourage further behaviour like it.

That or she could just mind control her but, no, that was another rule. No bringing up mind control at breakfast.

She’d just keep that one to herself.

“Speaking of group activities, it’s game night tonight,” Kara cut in, Addy pausing mid-rise. “I’ll be calling everyone in, so uh, Alex, please don’t wear out Winn too much?”

Alex snorted. “No promises, he’s... he’s gonna need the fitness training.”

Kara ignored her valid assessment of Winn's rather noodly arms, turning directly to Addy. “I know you don’t always stick around for them, but maybe this one? It’ll be at like, six o’clock, so you should be out by then!”

Addy paused, then nodded. “If I finish my tasks early enough, I will try to be back here in time for it.”

* * *

Luthor Corp had changed since she’d last been there.

For starters, where before most of the crowd was firmly outside, now a lot of them were very much inside. The main lobby was fully unpacked and set up, with tall, rectangular screens - the ‘terminals’ she was assuming - around every corner, touch-based and interactive to give an overview of Luthor Corp’s current projects, building layout, and more. The security desk had been set up too, no longer necessitating she get scanned down by tired-looking security personnel and instead requiring her to simply pass through a pair of tall metal detectors, which pinged off of her laptop and keys, but was quickly solved after showing them to the security guard in question.

The front desk lady was different this time too. The plaque on the desk simply read _Kelso Smith_ and, somehow, he looked exactly as you’d expect someone named Kelso Smith to look. He was... bland, blonde-haired, tall and gangly despite looking like he was in his mid-30s, with gray eyes, a mutinously bored expression on his face, and a voice that spoke in something just shy of a monotone. He had enough inflection to imply he was largely disappointed and disinterested in everything involved, but not so much that he sounded very alive.

Addy had ended up waiting twenty-five minutes to get to the front of the line, a fact that made her very briefly proud of her decision to arrive much earlier than was expected of her. She just hoped others had done the same as she did, as the line behind her snaked back and forth and was at least fifty people strong, all waiting to get the bare minimum access to their jobs.

Kelso wasn’t looking at her right now, thankfully, and was instead muttering beneath his breath as he poured over his keyboard, rapid-fire typing as he checked all the credentials she had listed off as necessary. The fat, outdated-looking printer to the right of his monitor was chugging sluggishly, one end of a card slowly being spit out through a set of flexible teeth across an opening.

“Ah, found it,” Kelso announced, sounding rather relieved. “Adeline Queen, lab group four... Sub-floor 4. We’ll—ugh, moving has utterly messed up our systems. Are these all seriously _default_ names based on floor—actually, you know what. I don’t care. My boss can handle it, I am paid exactly enough to warrant doing this job and it does _not_ include renaming everything.”

With a stretch of his arm, he plucked the card from the reader, reaching down with the other to yank open a drawer. Wheeling back on his wheeled chair - Addy really hoped she was about to get one - he reached inside to pull out a slip of plastic and another lanyard, dropping them unceremoniously on the table in front of him. He stuffed the card into the plastic sleeve, clipped the lanyard on, and held it out towards her.

She took it.

“It might say lab group 4 there, but it’s supposed to be... theoretical applied sciences?” He didn’t sound very sure, which invalidated the entire point of telling her that. “Something like that, a bunch of scientific journal mumbo-jumbo. Look, just, come back in a week, they’ll get you one that doesn’t have what amounts to a placeholder name. Anyway, next!”

Addy shuffled to the side as a man about six-foot-seven walked in to fill the space, mumbling something about the programming team, to which Kelso sighed ever-so-dramatically and went back to tapping away on his keyboard.

Walking further away from the long line of possible coworkers, Addy slung the lanyard over her head, letting the card hang free in the center of her chest. The area around the elevators, much like everywhere else on the main floor, was utterly packed, and she was forced to grit her teeth and resign herself to close proximity to others.

She arrived a little ways away from the crowded elevator space, silently taking up a place beside a slightly shorter woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes, and round glasses, maybe in her mid-20s, if not early 30s. She was carrying a lab coat over one shoulder, and didn’t even so much as bother to glance her way.

The elevator doors dinged, pulling open to reveal an empty lift. The crowd surged forward, about half of them vanishing inside before someone said something about the limit being reached and the doors unceremoniously shutting in the faces of those who remained. Another elevator opened a handful of seconds later, and about a quarter of the remaining crowd peeled off towards it in a rush, including the large, broad man who had been behind her in the past line, leaving just herself, the blonde woman, and a scattering of others.

Finally, a third elevator door opened - out of four, arranged to face one-another - and Addy shuffled into it along with the others, swiping her card into the reader first out of anyone, the button for ‘B4’ lighting up. She ignored the curious look the blonde woman sent her way as the rest of the cluster of people swiped their own cards, the rows of elevator buttons lighting up one-by-one to indicate where they were going.

Thankfully, seemingly against all odds, the elevator decided to descend first, rather than what Addy had expected, which was that it would ascend, and then go into the sub-floors. Nobody was going to B1-to-B3, so it was altogether a particularly short trip, the elevator grinding to a halt and opening up into a long concrete hallway with steel walls and bright fluorescent lights.

Addy stepped out, and so did the blonde woman.

They shared a look.

“Lab group 4?” The woman asked, voice wry.

Addy nodded, reaching up to tug at her card. The blonde woman’s eyes tracked down, crinkling at the edges as a polite smile fixed itself across her face.

“Serling Roquette,” she introduced herself, extending her hand.

Addy stared at it, but was obligated by manners to take it and shake it. It was not a comfortable experience, flesh-against-flesh, especially with the box she’d been shoved into to arrive here in the first place, so she was more than glad when Serling - apparently - let go.

“You’re the newbie, then,” Serling continued, taking a step forward and moving towards the other end of the hallway. Addy trailed quietly behind her, listening. “You probably don’t know it, but the team—all of us moved to Minneapolis, after Lena left to run the company. Emil’s in charge now, and he’s probably here already.”

Their destination in the hallway wasn’t far, not even reaching the other end. Instead, it was one of the various labelled doors, each one fitted with an etched metal plaque above the frame of the door itself. The doors were metal, with card-readers where the knobs should be, though Addy could see a keyhole too, probably to be used if the power went out and people had to get in or out of the area.

Serling plucked her card - without a lanyard or sleeve - and swiped it through the reader, the door _clicking_ and thereafter buzzing. She pulled the door open by the handle, and Addy followed in after her.

The lab space was... surprising. It was mostly a flat, open area, easily larger than Kara’s apartment by two or three times, and perfectly square. In it were a series of cubicles, each one with a name on it - Emil Hamilton, Serling Roquette, June Robbins, and Addy Queen - written in big, blocky letters, as though someone had cut them out and glued them on. The rest of the space was mostly uncluttered, with concrete floors and several long, fold-out tables, as well as what appeared to be a window into a testing space, not that she could make out what was behind it from where she was.

There were people there too. Serling was already striding forward to greet them, a smile on her lips as she strut towards a man. The man in question was old, easily the oldest out of everyone here, with a full, brown-gray beard and wrinkles covering most of his face. His eyes were dark brown, almost chocolate, and his skin pasty-white. He was wearing a white dress shirt coupled with suspenders and pants, and had a big watch on his wrist.

Next to the older man was another woman, this one the youngest out of them all. She was maybe in her early twenties, if that, with long strawberry blonde hair that reached her mid-back, pale blue eyes, and conventionally attractive features. The sort of archetypal ‘good looking young adult woman’, in a manner of speaking. She, like Addy, was not in formal wear or anything like it, instead opting for jeans and a form-fitting t-shirt.

“Emil!” Serling called out. “How’s National City been treating you, old man?”

Emil - the old man, she was assuming - coughed awkwardly. “The heat is unpleasant and air conditioning unreliable, so not very well!”

“You could’ve stayed in Metropolis,” Serling chided, voice taking on an almost condescending tone.

Emil scoffed, rolling his eyes as he fitted both of his worn hands into his pockets. “And leave you to look after the team? No, I don’t think so, Serling.” His eyes slid over to her, then, curiosity fitting itself comfortably over wrinkled features. “Is this our newest member?”

“Ah, right,” Serling skidded to a stop, glancing between the two in front of her and Addy behind her. “Right, this is Adeline Queen, if her card is to be believed. Adeline, this is Emil Hamilton, the leader of our research team and a man well beyond his prime, and June Robbins, someone who graduated from MIT faster than Lena, somehow. June, Emil, this is Adeline.”

Stepping forward, Addy bobbed her head as politeness dictated. “I prefer Addy.”

June was the first to respond, stepping out from behind Emil with a smile. “Then call me June. I specialize in robotics and artificial intelligence. Lena recruited me straight out of MIT for her team a year ago, back when I first made Ultivac.”

Addy did not know what exactly that was, but she’d look into it.

Emil was the next to step forward, smiling politely behind his bristly beard. “I’m Emil Hamilton, as mentioned. I’ve been working for Luthor Corp for a very long time. I mostly worked on prosthetics and other disability aids, but moved on to general robotics once this team was formed. I am also your boss, as it happens.”

He shot a look at Serling, who didn’t even try to look sheepish or chastised.

“Please forgive Serling, she’s got something of a big head,” Emil continued, ignoring Serling’s protests. “Serling Roquette joined us directly from Spheerical Industries a few years ago, where she was working on a series of projects related to nanotechnology. Lena used to be the one to keep her on a leash, but, alas, it comes down to me now. It’s good to meet you, though in saying that, I must say, you are quite the unknown. May I ask what you were hired for, specifically?”

“My mathematics expertise,” Addy explained, matter-of-fact.

All of them looked at her. Emil cleared his throat again, sounding a bit awkward. “What part of mathematics?”

“All of it,” she clarified, drawing more confused looks. “I was hired specifically through a recommendation due to my understanding of mathematics as a whole. Before this, I was working as a junior IT tech for CatCo.”

More confused looks. Disbelieving, really. “I can show you when we get a project,” she offered, not sure what else to say.

The rest of the team shared a look before, with a shrug, apparently accepting as much. “Lena wouldn’t’ve hired you for no reason,” Serling offered, rubbing her hands together. “If she found some mathematical genius, it just makes our jobs easier. If it doesn’t, well, you won’t last very long in the first place.”

That sounded an awful lot like a threat.

“Please, Serling,” Emil said, sounding exasperated. “Don’t start anything.”

The door behind Addy _clicked_ , buzzing. The team, along with her, swivelled just in time to catch Lena Luthor peeking her head in through the crack in the door.

“Ah, you’re all here already. Good.” She pulled the door open fully, stepping inside. “I don’t have very long, this move has been a _mess_ , thanks to half of the administration staff jumping ship. Are you already all acquainted with one another?”

Addy glanced towards the other three, who in turn glanced at her.

She nodded.

“Right,” Lena said, taking a step further into the room. She was wearing another business-style suit-dress-thing that Addy didn’t have a good name for, with tall stilettos that looked genuinely painful and potentially useful as a weapon, and had a single tall cup of coffee clutched like a lifeline in one hand. A closer inspection showed hints of bruising beneath each eye, not from injuries, but likely from fatigue.

Lena took a long chug of her coffee, eyes shutting.

She broke the seal between her lips and the cup, breathing out a touch sluggishly. “So, team. Welcome to National City, where it’s hot, full of loud noises, and has its own super.”

“I like Supergirl more than Superman,” June chirped, clearly trying to inject some enthusiasm into things.

Serling was apparently not about to let that stand. “Only because she didn’t destroy your stuff yet.”

June shot Serling an acidic look, and Addy wasn’t sure if it was in humour or not. “One rogue artificial intelligence, _one_ , and you never live it down!”

“Okay, guys,” Lena interrupted, snapping her fingers loud enough that it echoed. “You can squabble over things later, off of company time. This team is changing tracks from its previous focus on general robotic research, and more towards xenotechnology, as you should all know.

“With that in mind, what we’ll be looking at going into the future is a mix of priorities. As it stands, the auctions for the technology aren’t to happen for a while yet as the US hashes out international details, and until we get our hands on research-worthy equipment, you’ll be working on a more general project. How many of you remember the black body field project I was working on?”

Emil raised his hand, so did June. Serling stared on with a blank expression. Addy said nothing, merely listening and watching.

“Well, half-and-half, so I guess I have to say it. The black body field generator was a bit of a multi-purpose project meant to be a way to interrupt or interfere with energy-based weapons, which I started to make after an... _accident_ with a laser cannon. I have the project details on the computers in your cubicles, but that’s what you’ll be stewing over for the time being, and considering the sudden influx of laser pistols and other alien tech, we should look at potentially marketing it as a deterrent, as alien technology seems to be here to stay.”

Lena scanned across the room again, pursing her lips. “Any questions?”

There were none.

“Good,” Lena said, taking a step back towards the door. “Get to know each other a bit more, maybe look over the details, but it’s not expected of you today. Feel free to leave at any time, but tomorrow come in with your game face on. We have work to do, and I now have to go and placate my board to ensure nobody thinks it’s _acceptable_ to try to get a contract with a major arms dealer again.”

Then she was gone, a flurry of expensive clothes and roasted coffee beans. The door clicked shut behind her, followed by a stretch of awkward silence as neither Addy nor anyone else for that matter made any move to do anything.

“I think she’s going to go gray by thirty,” Serling blurted, and the tension broke.

Emil scratched at his own beard, taking a step towards one of the tables. “Yes, well, that’s what happens when you have supervillains in the family, I suppose.”

June stepped up to her side, a soft smile playing over her features. “Hello,” she said.

Addy blinked, nodding back. “Hi.”

“We should probably get to know each other,” June said, and Addy was inclined to agree. “So, uh, I’ve always been bad at this. But what hobbies do you have?”

...Maybe this was going to be more difficult than she previously expected.

* * *

The logistics behind making a cross-country shopping trip was complicated.

It had started, of course, after she left her job just shy of one o’clock and arrived at the local National City bank. There, she had transferred approximately two grand into the Swedish krona equivalent, asking mostly for 1000 kronor bills, as the Swedish krona had an exchange rate and value more equivalent to the Japanese _yen_ than it did the more traditional North American dollar. The process had taken a while - especially the probing questions about why she wanted so many Swedish kronor, to which she had not exactly lied and said she was visiting soon - and by the end of it had been nearly 3 in the afternoon when she’d come out with a wallet packed with kronor.

Next was informing people she’d be out of contact for the near future.

“ _What do you mean you’ll be out of contact range?_ ” Kara’s voice was a touch hysterical on the other end of the line.

Fastening the velcro glove into the colour ports along the wrist of her suit, Addy watched a shimmer of light play over it, her hand vanishing much like the rest of her had. Winn had made a particularly amazing product, and Kalvar technology never ceased to baffle. He had intended for it to be only used to map new patterns and things onto her costume, but in recreating Kalvar technology so closely, he had unintentionally paved the way for her to make some easy adjustments to the programming of the app which controlled the patterns on her suit and in turn grant herself the ability to turn herself invisible when wearing it.

She had been using it for nearly a month now, and each time she could only be quietly delighted by the fact that Winn could enable such a thing, even if it was in no way even _remotely_ intentional. There was a reason why she had kept the fact that her suit could now turn her invisible a secret, after all, seeing as she sincerely doubted they would let her keep it if they knew.

Turning back to her phone - perched on a stump - Addy cleared her throat. “I am going to use money to acquire goos—goods and services,” she explained.

“ _Wh—Addy, what were you about to say in the first place?_ ”

Kara had been right about there being a human-sized goose plushie for sale at IKEA, of course. What she had gotten wrong was that there was only one way for her to get it: going to one of the several stores in Sweden which had them in stock. Thankfully, she could speak every language on the planet at this point, had self-propulsion as a form of fast flight, and knew exactly where she needed to go to find it.

Of course, the main reason why she was using the invisibility for this trip was that, in the end, reports of an approximately seven-foot-tall goose being dragged through the air would be very difficult to connect to her, whereas a woman carrying a seven-foot-tall goose through the air would be very much an easy thing to identify her with. She would, of course, switch into civilian clothes when she arrived, and switch back into her costume when she left, but it was best to play it safe.

Reaching for her phone, she took it off of the stump, switched the speaker mode off, and brought it up to her ear. “I said goods and services,” she repeated.

“ _No, Addy, I’m pretty sure you were about to say goose. I swear to Rao, Addy, do not bring home a pet! We already talked about the problems you’d have raising a domesticated goose! My apartment doesn’t even allow dogs!_ ”

That was a shame, yes, but not what she was after this time around. “I am not about to buy a pet,” she said, instead, beginning to make her way to the water’s edge. The pacific coast stretched well out beyond the limits of the forest, eddying waves that splashed against a private beach she had been using as a pit-stop to get her costume on outside of public view.

“... _That’s oddly specific._ ”

“I’m taking off now,” Addy said, easing herself into the air.

“ _Addy—what are you doing?_ ”

“Gotta go,” she said, cutting the line and stuffing her phone back into her pocket.

Kara would forgive her once she brought back her quarry.

* * *

Kara’s apartment building was not very accommodating to her new acquisition. The elevator door was too small, and the head of her goose knocked against it when she went in, and sort of kinked the neck awkwardly on the ride up. The goose itself, in the hallway leading up to the apartment, was just a little too wide, causing one of the goose’s big, floppy, _delightful_ wings to tap-tap-tap against it.

The goose’s amazing flippers dragged somewhat against the floor, though she kept it as high as possible to avoid that, seeing as she did not want to have to clean it, which in turn caused the goose’s head to bounce against the fluorescent lights.

Still, it certainly beat the whole ‘being-tailed-by-the-Swedish-airforce-for-seventy-miles’ that she had to deal with. What did they think the goose was? An enemy aircraft? Sometimes she worried about the people in power.

Arriving at the door, Addy fumbled a bit, suddenly struck by the fact that she might have to set the goose down to acquire her keys to unlock the door. That... wouldn’t do.

Instead, she leaned forward and promptly headbutted the door. Not as hard as she could - she didn’t want to put her head _through_ it - but loud enough that she heard a series of shouts from inside due to the bang.

Feet shuffled forward, the lock clicked, and the door swung open.

“I called it!” Winn shouted from inside.

Alex’s accompanying groan followed.

Addy peeked her head around the neck of the goose, staring at Kara in the doorway. Her eyes were flicking between the goose and her face, like she wasn't sure which to focus on more. Her expression swung between exasperation and relief, before finally settling _mostly_ on relief. Kara sighed, loud and noisy, stepping aside to wave her in.

Addy toddled in, seven-foot-tall goose plushy and new bedside friend clutched to her chest. Ahead of her, in the living room, Alex was mulishly handing over a twenty-dollar bill to Winn, who hadn’t stopped cackling since his announcement that, to quote, ‘he had been right’.

“They bet on what you were bringing home,” Kara explained tiredly, audibly locking the door behind her. “He might’ve checked your finances, saw you took out two grand in Swedish... whatever they’re called.”

“Krona for single, kronor for multiples. It means crown,” Addy explained brightly, stumbling mostly blind towards her divider, using what she could remember of the layout of the area to slip into the gap and finally plop her stuffed goose onto her bed.

It looked perfect. And huggable.

Did she really need to do game night? She could just... go to sleep, with her new goose. It was exhilarating to know it was there.

To think, it only cost her what had been before about a month and a half of her wages!

Much, much better than a diamond ring, in her opinion. She could buy several of those monthly with the money she was getting from Luthor Corp, though she wasn’t sure if there would be enough space... or real reason, now that she thought about it.

“So, is uh, your new goose friend going to join us?” Kara called out, Addy shucking her shoes beneath her bed and tugging her laptop bag back over her head, plopping it down on the bedside table, before doing the same with her jacket.

“Geese don’t know how to play board games,” Addy said, glancing back out the gap in the dividers, finding Kara staring awkwardly at her.

She might be able to change that though but—no, projects for later.

“...That makes sense,” Kara said, at last. “But uh, you gonna keep it around? You can take the couch! Like, maybe you want to show it off, or something?”

Addy spared another glance at her new, human-sized - as geese probably should be - plush goose. She was feeling awfully possessive of it, and who knows who might want to touch it without her permission.

...But at the same time, she was also very proud of having the goose in the first place.

Choices, choices.

“Can you hurry up, though?” Alex called out. “Lucy and James are going to be here in like, _ten minutes_ and I need to know if we have to pull out the fold-out table to play monopoly because a huge goose is in the way.”

Kara stared at her.

Addy stared at Kara.

It would be a particularly effective way to impose her glory on James by showing the goose...

“Addy,” Kara started, sounding wary.

Oh, her expression got away from her again. She schooled it, offering a bright smile in Kara’s direction who, for whatever reason, did not actually seem all that soothed by it.

“Sure, I’m bringing it along.”

“Alright, Winn, pull out the table!” Alex barked.

Winn yelped. “You ran me ragged today! Do it yourself!”

“If you don’t, I’ll make you do even more tomorrow.”

“That’s abuse! Toxic workplace! I’m calling HR!”

There was a _whack_ , Winn squawked.

“We don’t have an HR! Get the table!”

“Why are you so scary?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More fluff!
> 
> (But hopefully good fluff)
> 
> Also introducing some of Addy's new, er, friends? Colleagues? Who knows. If you recognize any of these characters, assume they mostly ascribe to their more popular versions (i.e: Young Justice Serling Roquette, albeit less... unhinged).


	31. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets to work. Things explode.

The second the elevator opened wide enough, Addy was scrambling out of it. The packed throng of people - among which she had, just recently, been one - was a low murmur of discomfort at the edge of her senses, the feeling of being squished in among five or six too many people, without any space to escape.

Taking in a breath, Addy turned in time to watch the doors slide shut, the elevator beeping once as it went off to whatever destination came next. She was alone, the world was quiet.

The hallway looked identical to how it had yesterday, unsurprisingly. A long corridor of concrete and metal, doors set in at consistent intervals. It was innocuous, without a single sign of danger, and yet she couldn’t help but be wary of it. Wary of her destination, a door she could already pick out from the rest, not too far away.

She’d forgotten to do research on her coworkers.

Obtaining Saturday the Goose - named by Alex, who had claimed that they just _looked like a Saturday sort of goose_ , which was a delightfully correct observation - was not a mistake on her part, but the decision to push everything to the side possibly was. By the time she’d finished up game night with Kara and started to get ready for bed, she’d realized that not only had her thoughts been preoccupied enough by her future trip to Sweden that she’d entirely forgotten to do a cursory scrape of her coworker’s minds, but that she’d also completely neglected to do the very valuable research that would give her insights into who they were outside of what they _wanted_ her to know.

It was, in a word, an utter travesty. Her schedule had no time or room for researching them come morning, either, especially considering she had miscalculated how long it would take to _arrive_ at Luthor Corp but—

No.

Addy took in a breath, let it out. Just like she remembered Taylor doing. She centred herself, let the wordless river of data from her coreself wash over her, let her heart settle in her chest.

She would be fine.

It was a hard thing to tell herself sometimes. She didn’t do well with ambiguity, as she had come to learn, but she would have to deal with this. If they were truly bad, she would know, and she would react accordingly. She would not panic over something that hadn’t happened yet, not as she had before.

She was better than that.

Reaching up, Addy tugged the lanyard cord out from under her shirt, stepping forward with stiff legs as she did. She passed by the first couple of doors, eyes scanning, until she finally arrived at the lab. She reached out carefully, forced down the urge to overthink things - and, again, she was sincerely bewildered that she could _do that now_ \- and swiped her card through the door, pulling it open as it buzzed.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected, glancing inside, but it was not this.

On one of the tables, a small pile of robots no larger than a watermelon sat in various states of disrepair. Some were in pieces, pulled apart with circuitry exposed, and others were entirely put together. Most of them came equipped with weapons—saws, what looked like a flamethrower, and more.

Serling, Emil and June were there too, sitting around the table. June was the furthest from her, laptop in front of her with a cord connecting up to one of the few fully-built robots. Serling, a few paces away from Emil, was fiddling with what looked like a handheld buzzsaw, a screwdriver in one hand as she tried to pry some of the back panels off. Next to her, Emil was picking away at a circuit board, staring at it only to glance towards a small notebook in his hand and back again.

“What’s this?” The words left her mouth before she could stop them. Maybe it was the absurdity, maybe it was the vague sense that they should be doing work - after all, respect was _very important_ \- maybe it was a mix of it. Addy wasn’t sure, and wasn’t really in a place to process it.

Heads swivelled towards her.

“Oh! Good morning, Addy,” Emil said, cheerily, like he and his team were doing something entirely normal. Maybe they were? Addy... wasn’t sure, really. They probably weren’t, but she—no. Overthinking. “This is just, ah, playing around with robotics. It’s always a good way to pass the time with robot design.”

“Don’t forget about the weapons,” Serling interjected, though she sounded distracted.

Emil looked at Serling for a moment, lips pursed, before turning back to her. “As I said, it’s a nice way to pass the time,” he said, disregarding his colleague in an impressive display of dismissal.

Serling was apparently too preoccupied with her buzzsaw to reply.

“Would you like to join us?”

Glancing around the room, finding nothing out of sorts, Addy finally eased herself past the threshold of the door, letting it shut behind her. “What about the black box field generator?” She asked, instead.

Emil blinked. “You didn’t get the email?”

She hadn’t had the _time_ to check her email this morning. She just shook her head, not willing to admit that.

“Oh, well that explains that. Lena sent out a company-wide notice, someone with objections to our company—”

“All hail,” Serling, again, interjected, tone dry and sarcastic.

Emil didn’t even acknowledge that. “Someone with an axe to grind decided to shut down the majority of our internal and external servers. We currently can’t even log in, it’s that bad.”

Oh. That wasn’t entirely unexpected, Lena Luthor was nothing if not a polarizing figure. People hated her for being related to Lex and profiting off of the Luthor’s excessive and, purportedly, less than ethical wealth, and those who didn’t usually hated her for not being like Lex Luthor _enough_. That must be a miserable tightrope to walk; at least the expectations people had for _her_ were rooted in reality and basic etiquette.

“So, again, would you like to join us? You don’t have to, I know robots aren’t everyone’s thing, but it’s a bit of a tradition for us. We have company-wide contests, or at least we did back in Metropolis—does anyone know if Lena is continuing them in National City?” Emil cast a glance towards the other two.

Serling didn’t bother to respond, having at some point managed to get the back panel off and traded her screwdriver out for a pair of plastic tweezers.

June blinked at both of them, a distant, confused look on her face, before clarity clicked back into place. “I think so?” she said, at last. “Probably? I mean, I can’t see why not?”

Emil turned back to her, motioning with one hand. “There you go. So?”

Addy tilted her head, glanced at the pile of robotics. She felt, again, the bitter annoyance of not bothering to integrate that Tinker packet back when it had been offered. At the same time, though, it probably would’ve made things like this trivial and, thinking back on it, it probably would’ve made it boring. Boredom was scary, but maybe... this might be interesting.

“Okay,” she said, at last, shouldering her laptop bag over her head, clasping it tightly with her hand and making her way over to the desk.

“Great!” Emil said, sounding genuinely pleased. “So, you can work with any of us or on your own. June is working on a basic AI, I am working on getting this circuit board mapped, and Serling is working on a weapon for her robot.”

“His name,” Serling said, with great drama, like she had just been slighted in a Victorian-era period piece. “Is Edmund Deathdigits.”

“I refuse to say that,” June said, peeking over the top of her laptop. She had been the most receptive to her yesterday, and while it would probably be beneficial to get more information on both Emil and Serling, Addy found her feet carrying her right up next to June without much thought to it.

Addy tugged the chair out, plopped her laptop down, and eased herself into the uncomfortable embrace of inflexible plastic and metal.

June smiled at her, nudging her own laptop so it slightly faced her. On it was a coding program Addy didn’t really have a name for, not that you couldn’t code in nearly anything in the first place.

“This is, uh, well,” June hesitated, squinting at her. “How much experience do you have in AI, anyway? We never did talk about what you were known for outside of mathematics.”

Addy blinked. “Enough.” She wasn’t sure she could build one _herself_ , but AI had always been a bit of a worry for any cycle. It was bad enough safeguarding against the host species, AIs had a wonderful - or sometimes horrifying - ability to adapt to nearly anything and reiterate. They’d eventually added hard limits to them, though as evidenced by Dragon, whichever shard in managing Tinker limits had clearly not done its job properly.

June smiled, nodding. “Well, okay so. When I built Ultivac, we made it from a big mix of neural networks and basic learning programs. It was originally meant to be a content-identifier for a company that was paying us to make it, you know? Then everything else happened and—just, it wasn’t fun. _Anyway_ , so, this is sorta like that? I’ve gotten better with making stunted intelligences, this is a bit of a network of neural networks, I’m teaching it how to ascertain threats.”

She nodded, glancing over the lines of code, the web-like diagram hovering next to everything as the computer continuously put the thing through repetitive tests, discarding what failed, reiterating on what didn’t.

“It’s intended to be about as smart as a uh, puppy?” June’s voice petered off, a bit of a queasy look coming over her face. “That’s a really bad comparison, considering this is going to go in a robot that’ll fight other robots for _sport_ , but like. You get the idea?”

She did. “Why are you limiting the intelligence?”

June shrugged, pursing her lips. “Bad experiences, and it needs to be, well, not _small_ , I’ll be hosting it on a portable server that isn’t in the robot itself, but it needs to be small enough that I don’t have to tote around a server farm.”

That was an oddly specific example. Opening her mouth, Addy was very promptly cut off by the loud, electric _screech_ of whirling machinery and the high, villainous cackle of someone with too much power in their hands.

Heads, including her own, swivelled.

Serling had the buzzsaw held up in one hand, arcs of visible electricity coursing along the edge of the spinning blade in a thin, cyan outline. Her head was thrown back, and she was crowing - and laughing - with triumph.

Emil scrambled to his feet. “Serling put the damn malfunctioning buzzsaw _down_! You’ll kill—”

“WHAT?” Serling belted, slipping out of her seat and towards the center of the room before Emil could grab hold of her. “SORRY, I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER HOW AMAZING I AM. THEY SAID I COULDN’T DO IT, BUT GUESS WHAT? I _TOTALLY DI_ —”

The rest of the conversation was lost as Emil staggered towards her, clearly trying to take the buzzsaw from her.

“Serling, she uh,” June started, drawing Addy’s attention. She halted, hesitated, her eyes focused pointedly on the buzzsaw. “She’s a lot. She gets overexcited about things, and especially this. Every year she takes a week off to go and do, like, underground robotics stuff? Big expositions, makes a lot of money and puts that into new inventions. I think that’s the new weapon she’s putting on it.”

The screech of the buzzsaw died off, leaving Addy’s ears merely _ringing_ painfully, instead of feeling like they were trying to crawl back into her skull in protest. Emil had one hand on his face while Serling did a little jig right in place, a literal victory dance.

“Isn’t that illegal?” Addy asked at last, glancing back June’s way.

June, in turn, just snorted. “That’s never stopped her before.”

Well, at least it was a smart idea. Glancing at the buzzsaw again and running over what Serling had said about it, she was pretty sure the electricity was intentional. That’d be a dangerous weapon in anyone’s hands, let alone someone who was about to strap it to several pounds of solid metal and wheels.

She approved.

Emil wandered back over to them, Serling booking it off towards one of the closets with a cackling whoop.

“She wants to show us her new inventive war crime,” he explained belatedly, glancing worriedly over his shoulder. “Wish she could at least tell me when electrical discharge is _intentional_ before she turns the damn thing on.”

June glanced her way, then towards Emil, before shrugging and rising to her feet. Addy followed after her, pausing briefly to tug her laptop out from her bag and set it up right next to June’s, though she kept the lid closed for now. They made their way around the table, Emil hanging up front, eyes focused towards where Serling had gone.

The woman in question emerged once again, rolling a large, solid cylinder of metal with the heel of her foot, clearly not interested in carrying it. Emil stepped forward just in time to stop it from rolling off beneath the table, halting it with the heel of his snazzy, shiny black shoes.

Serling scrambled over, reaching down to tug the cylinder up into a vertical standing position. “Okay, so, I am a _wizard_ , do you know how hard it is to contain electricity and have a moving part like a buzzsaw?”

Nobody said anything.

The buzzsaw revved to life again, Addy reaching up with her only hand to plug at least one ear. June glanced at her, frowning in sympathy, but made no move to cover her other ear. She was thankful about that, seeing as her boundaries still existed, despite needs to the contrary.

“IT’S REALLY HARD,” she continued, yelling over the scream of her saw. “IT’S OVERLAPPING MAGNETIC FIELDS AND DISTORTION AND WHATEVER. THING IS, I’M BUILT DIFFERENT.”

The buzzsaw came down, meeting the metal with an unholy scream. Or maybe that was just Serling’s scream. Addy wasn’t sure. Still, whichever one it was, the buzzsaw kept gliding through the metal like it was butter, forks of cyan lightning jumping to the floor off of the metal cylinder, but not harming Serling as she carved a straight line right through it.

The top half of the cylinder slipped, tumbled, and fell apart.

Serling clicked the buzzsaw off, beaming at them with no small amount of pride.

Emil somehow managed to clap sarcastically. June, meanwhile, clapped more genuinely.

Addy glanced at her hand, then her stump, then at Serling.

She opted to clap her hand against her leg, instead, just to make an effort.

“God, I haven’t felt this alive in a while,” Serling said triumphantly.

“Well, I hope you carry that into your _work_ ,” a new voice interjected.

Addy swivelled her head, catching sight of Lena Luthor. She was wearing a suit this time, still with heels, coloured a dark, dark blue. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and one leg was tucked idly in front of the other, an indulgent smile pulled across her features.

“I didn’t do it,” Serling blurted without much prompting.

“No, you didn’t. I just came to tell you that everything’s back up and running. Whoever decided to shut us down left us a gift in the server room, and it was what was causing all of the problems. It’s fixed. Honestly, I also wanted to check in. Glad you finally figured out how to make that circular saw work.” There was something faintly bittersweet about her tone, and it wasn’t just Addy who picked up on it. Everyone was looking strained, awkward, almost sad.

She was missing a lot of context.

“Yeah, it’s uh, great.” Gone was the endless enthusiasm and smug pride, replaced by something awkward and sheepish.

Lena shut her eyes for a moment. “Good. I’ll see you later?”

It sounded like a lie.

Emil nodded. “Have a good day, Lena.”

Some of the tension in the air eased, and Lena smiled at him, something genuine in the twist to her features. “I’ll try my hardest.”

Lena turned then, dragging her card through the reader and tugging the door open with a grunt. She spared the four of them one last look before departing, the door swinging shut behind her.

“God,” Serling muttered, barely a second later. “I know she was my _boss_ , before, but now that she’s my _boss_ boss it’s so weird.”

“Serling, June, clean up a little?” Emil said, tactfully ignoring Serling’s words. “I’ll go get the whiteboard, we got some things to go over. Addy, feel free to just settle down, you arrived late, this is our mess. Okay?”

She blinked, feeling oddly like the center of attention, but still nodded. Emil sent her another awkward smile before walking off towards another one of the storage closets. June and Serling went to work without a word in edgewise, Serling scooping the ruined bits of metal up off the floor while June carefully took apart the pile of robots and stacked them in piles.

Addy wandered back towards the table, settling herself down in her chair again. She eased her laptop open, logged in, and then went through the tedious process of connecting up to the building WiFi to get access to staff-restricted network storage. It took a few more seconds than it had the day before, but it was only a small delay, not the lack-of-access that had been described before.

She tabbed through the folder marked under her name, copying the black box field generator plans to her desktop.

The sound of wheels scraping against the floor drew her back, her eyes sliding up to watch Emil push the large thing into place at the front of the table. On it was a near replica of the diagram on the file, just with an endless assortment of notes just next to it.

June settled down in the chair next to her, while Serling finished moving all of the junk to the far end of the table, finally taking a seat too.

Emil, remaining standing, gestured towards it. “So, this is the black box field generator. Its main purpose is to disrupt forms of energy and charge present in the space around it,” he began, voice relaxing back into its more easy cadence, rather than the strained, awkward thing that he’d been speaking with around Lena. “It’s... advanced,” he continued. “Advanced enough that even Lena didn’t really fully understand it. I know its inception came when her brother blew a hole in her house with a laser cannon”— _that_ was pertinent information Addy had not been made aware of. What part of _my brother nearly killed me_ was an accident?—“but the field itself isn’t something Lena knows completely. Hopefully, with more study and research, _we_ can change that, but we’re in a bit of a unique situation where this has been all theoretical physics until recently.”

Addy blinked, eyes ghosting over the words on the whiteboard.

“June? You know where the prototype is, right?” Emil asked after another moment.

June rose from her chair with a grunt, stepping around the table. “Yeah, one sec.”

Addy watched her vanish back into the labyrinth of storage closets.

“You know, I do wish we’d gotten some alien tech to test this on,” Serling mused, glancing tiredly at the board with a rather muted expression. “It’s not like it’s in short supply.”

“I’m pretty sure Lena’s playing it safe when it comes to alien tech and Luthor Corp being used in the same breath,” Emil pointed out.

Yet more subtext Addy only really barely knew about. She was sincerely going to have to do more research on the team in the near future. A lot more. Probably when she got home, but the draw of Saturday the Goose was... well. She could both hug Saturday and do research, she supposed. It wasn’t like she hadn’t multitasked before.

June emerged from the closet, dragging a cardboard box about the size of a storage chest by one of its flaps. Inside was a chunk of technology about the size of an engine, and that was about the best way to describe it, since there was no rhyme or reason to make out what it could or should be doing just by its outward appearance. It reminded her of that time in Taylor’s childhood when transparent cases around televisions, computers, and video game consoles had been really popular, though whatever the thing in the box was, it didn’t even have a clear case. It was just bare.

Emil wandered over just in time to help her hoist the chunk of corrugated metal and circuitry out from inside, a half-dozen cords hanging down from it. They placed it on the floor, for lack of any better place to put it, and June was quick to walk back to the table, slipping back down into her seat with a huff.

“I am so out of shape,” she groaned, scrubbing at her forehead with the back of her head, coming back damp with sweat.

Addy didn’t comment.

“So,” Emil interrupted, gesturing towards the chunk of metal next to his shoe. “This is Lena’s prototype. We’ve been warned it explodes.”

“Oh!” Serling visibly perked up, glancing more closely at the chunk of metal. “Neat.”

Emil _sighed_. “Really not the time, Serling. This isn’t fun and games, I’m gonna have to go and set it up in the test room—you know, the one we use to _avoid_ nearly killing everyone with malfunctions.”

Serling very pointedly did not look at him.

“June, I absolutely hate to ask you this, but can you help me get it set up? Lena confided with you the most about it.”

June groaned, pushing back up into a stand. “I am an old woman in spirit,” she groused good-naturedly. “My back is weak, my knees, frail, my lungs, weak.” Still, despite her words, she trundled over to Emil’s side, leaned down, and helped him heft the tech up and navigate the thing towards the test room.

The test room itself had a window into it, located just to the right of where the whiteboard had been maneuvered. Inside was a blank concrete room with concrete floors and a single light. The one door that connected up to it was reinforced, made entirely from metal, and had to be slid open physically, as evidenced by the fact that both Emil and June had to set the tech down to haul the door open.

After a few moments to catch their breath - it must weigh a lot, Addy knew - they hefted the device again and wobbled their way into the testing room.

“So,” Serling piped up the very second they were out of earshot. Addy turned to look at her, feeling something like suspicion crawl into her chest.

“Yes?” Addy said nevertheless, because it was good to be polite.

Serling leaned forward, a tablet in hand. She set it down in front of them, spun it around so it wasn’t upside down for her, and nudged it forward. “Think you can solve this?”

Addy stared at the math equation. This was... not what she was expecting. Going from Taylor’s memories and Kara’s warnings, she was expecting to be offered a limited amount of money to do morally dubious things. Could this be a morally dubious thing? Possibly.

Still, it was... really easy to answer. It couldn’t be that bad. “Sure.”

Serling snorted for some reason, leaning back in her chair.

Addy got to work, jotting down a few notes in the little answer box. She went over her logic, the corrections, what system she was using to calculate any of this - she still wasn’t sure if humans had figured this one out, but it was... easy; they probably knew - and, with a nod, spun it back around and nudged it back.

Serling took the tablet, starting to read over her work.

Emil and June emerged from the testing room, forcing the door shut behind them.

“What the fuck?” Serling blurted, or maybe a more operative word was _squawked_. She sounded startled.

...Maybe humans, well, hadn’t figured it out yet. It was hard to keep track, because Earth Bet had certainly understood that theorem, but that could be because of tinkertech and their failed attempts to explain it.

“Swear later, Serling,” Emil said, rummaging around in one pocket to retrieve, of all things, a laser pointer. He walked over to the table, snatching a bit of leftover scotch tape off of where a few strands had been left tagged to the corner of the table, and wrapped it tightly enough around the laser pointer’s button that it was forced on.

With that done, Emil walked over to the display window, reaching down just below it to open up a cubby that Addy had, until this very moment, thought was for storage. Instead, it was a sealed hole between the main room and the testing room, each side apparently capped by an airtight metal lid. He placed the laser pointer carefully down inside, aimed so that it would cast a beam across the testing room, and shut the lid, flicking a switch next to it.

There was a ka- _clunk_ , and Addy could now see the red beam streaking across the testing room.

“Ready?”

“I think we should talk about—” Serling started.

Emil flicked a third switch, just next to the door. The light inside of the testing room went from white to red, there was a low whine of live electricity, and then very promptly the world _shook_. There was a flash of light, the creak of metal and concrete, and a deafening _bang_ as whatever was inside lit up like a small-yield explosive.

Everyone but Addy dropped, hands over their head. Some shrieked, others just huddled.

The light faded, a smoke detector started to wail incessantly inside; the window looking into the test room was covered in a single, long black scorch mark.

“Okay,” Emil started, shakily rising to his feet. Serling and June soon followed them, Serling emerging from underneath the table, June from next to her chair. “That did not go as planned.”

“I still think we should talk about how she just solved a problem none of the rest of us could in the last thirty years,” Serling was quick to say, words coming out in a rush like she was afraid she was going to be cut off again by another explosion.

Everyone turned to stare at her.

* * *

Carrots and hummus were a wondrous combination. The slight sweetness of the carrot contrasted delightfully with the garlic and chickpeas, and it made eating the paste actually possible with the added texture it brought to the table.

Not, of course, that everyone agreed with her tastes.

Across from her, Emil was working his way through a roast beef sandwich, taking measured, careful bites, eyes focused on the paper he had her write up about what she’d given Serling. On the other end of the table, near to where they’d stacked the robot parts, Serling was demolishing twinkies one-by-one while June, with her colourful salad, watched on in rapt disgust.

“So,” Emil said, wiping at the corner of his mouth with one calloused thumb. “Today’s pretty big for you, huh?”

Addy sent her gaze down, towards her remaining carrots and hummus. This was _not_ a pretty big day for her, of course, because she was going to have to explain to J’onn why she just solved a long-time mathematical problem and how best to avoid associating her with it. He was not going to be happy, he might even be disappointed.

That was a very, very scary thought. Disappointed J’onn, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to take that.

“I might have to publish it anonymously, depending on what people say,” Addy said, at last, pausing to shovel another carrot into her mouth.

Emil’s face twisted a little, looking concerned. “...Addy, I know we’ve only met, but you can tell me if anything’s wrong, okay? Is everything okay at home?”

What. Addy boggled at him, couldn’t even stop the expression. Where had _that_ come from? “Yes, things are okay. Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Well, why would you post it anonymously? This is like, pretty big, people have made their careers off of less,” Emil replied, setting his sandwich down.

Ah. He thought she might be avoiding something or someone, or being controlled. Okay. That made more sense. A very astute mind, despite his normal exterior and general behaviour. How could she put this? She didn’t want to lie _outright_ , as that would cause problems down the line if she ever had to explain certain things. “It’s related to government protection,” she explained, which at least wasn’t _wrong_.

“Ah, you’ve made something for a supervillain before?” Emil less asked, more said, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Addy froze. What.

“I’m in a similar boat,” Serling explained between gorging on twinkies, glancing their way. “The Fog was a whole thing, and they don’t want people trying to abduct me to force me to make another copy of it. So I, y’know, get a lot of government oversight into my interpersonal relationships.”

She mentally added ‘The Fog’ to the increasingly large list of research topics, just below Ultivac, because she sincerely needed to know more about them.

“Same as Ultivac, though less oversight,” June piped up, smiling sheepishly. “Lot of people want something that could drop Superman into the Mariana Trench.”

...She had thought it was a type of vacuum cleaner? Well, it could still be, but she was starting to have her doubts now.

“Tampering with Kryptonite to make generators for clean energy and medical equipment sure hasn’t endeared me to the public much, either,” Emil mused, again, like this was normal.

There was an odd, awkward feeling in her chest, something like confusion, but not quite. Had Lena really made this team this way on purpose? Because three was a pattern at this point, and if each person here had been involved with, indirectly or not, some sort of weaponized threat to Superman, then she was starting to wonder about the logistics of putting her in here, too. She _knew_ Lena didn’t know enough about her to think she was an alien, just Maxwell Lord’s child born out of wedlock - which, again, she could not reiterate enough, _no_ \- but this felt like an oddly specific team to put her on.

Like she was trying to make a point about something.

Addy ate another carrot, trying to untangle her thoughts.

“I’m sure Lena will be pleased you’re already paying off, though,” Serling interjected, yanking Addy from her thoughts.

June scowled at Serling. “You can’t just base people on their relative value to you, Serling.”

You can’t? That was _certainly_ news to her.

“I already do that,” Serling said, tone still smug despite having to work its way around the better half of another twinkie. “You cannot shame someone who feels no shame.”

Emil coughed awkwardly, not a real cough, but one of the ones people used to break up conversations. “Perhaps we should move this conversation back to the black box field generator?” He tried.

“You’re a combat-adverse coward,” Serling jabbed, pointing a twinkie at Emil.

Emil just stared at her, unruffled. “Why do you think that’s a _bad_ thing?”

“I grew up in Gotham,” she explained brightly, a smile twitching at her upper lip. “Of course it’s a bad thing. Have you ever been run over by a mad clown?”

Before Addy could stop herself, she had said “no” along with the rest of the table.

Serling gestured, nodding rapidly. “See? That’s why you don’t get it. Curling up and avoiding conflict, that’s just gonna get you run over _twice_.”

“You know, a head injury would explain a lot of how you act,” June mused.

Serling squawked, affronted.

* * *

“...which is all I have for why it keeps exploding,” Emil finished, gesturing at the long list of possible reasons. Quantum-related mishaps, electromagnetic interference, mechanical failures, he’d gone over all of them not long after lunch.

Not just him, either. While June’s specialty sat mostly in the realm of artificial intelligence, she was a good hand at physics and circuitry. They had poured over the device after it had cooled down long enough to be handled, surprisingly undestroyed despite the explosion, and nobody had found anything.

Even Serling had offered a few ideas, though they’d mostly been shot down.

Still... something was tickling at the back of her head. Addy scanned over the math again, scratching idly at her chin, doing a few conversions. She checked the diagram again, eyes flicking back and forth.

“Any suggestions?” Emil tried weakly.

“Did we check if it isn’t including itself in the field?” Addy queried, because there was no sign that they had.

Heads turned.

There was a _collective_ groan.

Had she done something wrong? Addy glanced around a bit more nervously, eyes flicking, trying to find where _that_ reaction came from.

“I am such an idiot,” June moaned. “We all are, except you Addy. You are a treasure.”

Her chest warmed at the praise, not as strong as it might for Kara, but still with some heat. She felt her cheeks flush a little, and the fact that they did startled her. That... was not a response she’d had before, and she reached up to gently paw at her face with her hand to soothe the heat away. New expressions and feelings came seemingly every day, and she was starting to wonder if they’d ever end.

Still, Addy gathered herself. “Thank you,” she said, trying not to give away how much she was feeling.

June smiled back at her.

“June,” Serling whined, stumbling over towards the test room. “Can you bring the cage stuff? Should be in the robot pile. Maybe we can get this piece of shit working?”

Turning away, June wandered over to the robot pile while Serling stomped, somewhat like a toddler, towards the testing room. After a bit of rummaging, June soon followed her, vanishing into its scorched interior.

Emil, off to the side, approached with a big, happy smile on his face. “Sometimes we need people to check and see if we’re doing the bare minimum,” he explained, hands folded in front of him. “I never did formally do this, it was normally Lena’s job, but welcome to the team, Addy. We’re glad to have you, even if our reception was mixed.”

Addy stared at him for a moment, at his beard, his hair, his polite presentation, how he looked and behaved normally despite not a few hours ago admitting to getting involved in kryptonite-related tech. “The reaction was justified,” she said at last, fluttering a hand near her side. “You didn’t know who I was.”

“Yes, well, we should’ve had faith,” Emil said a bit more sternly, his smile weakening. “However little of there has been to go around, as of late.”

Before she could ask for clarification on that nugget of information, June peeked her head out through the opening.

“Can you two run simulations just to double-check? Modifying this frame is going to take a little while.”

Emil glanced at June, then back to her. “Would you like to see our in-house simulation software? State of the art.”

June, apparently taking that for what it was, vanished back inside.

Addy turned her full attention onto Emil, processing. “Sure,” she said at last, and let herself be led towards Emil’s workstation. Out of the cubicles, it was the only one that had any amount of activity in it yet; Addy hadn’t really used hers since she’d arrived, and as far as she could tell neither had Serling or June.

Emil’s cubicle had a few pictures of the man and what looked like his kids, a calendar with a lot of notes about birthdays, holidays, and so forth. There were a few other things—sticky notes that had started to collect next to his monitor, a phone with its charger plugged in left next to his computer’s tower, but little else.

Easing himself into the office chair, Emil flicked his computer on and was quick to log in, Addy averting her eyes for politeness’ sake. He navigated through a folder on his desktop, finally finding the executable and running it, a blank, console-esque screen popping up in the top left corner before the entire monitor was taking up by a single window with a densely-packed menu of buttons running along the top of the screen.

He navigated towards one of them, clicking it and bringing up another window. From there, he clicked, the program freezing for a moment before showing a static image of the black box field generator and a long list of code beside it, rapidly scrolling as the program initiated, set up, and finally settled.

“You know, Lena mostly designed this,” Emil mused, navigating through more menus, adding new variables. Addy couldn’t really follow it, she wasn’t familiar enough with the layout design. “She was the head of this team during Lex’s tenure as the CEO of Luthor Corp. She’s a brilliant woman.”

Addy glanced at him for a moment, hesitating. “Why did you work on kryptonite?” She asked, at last.

Emil didn’t look away from the screen. “Kryptonite, it’s...” he hesitated, sighing. “It’s not harmful to humans, not like most radioactive materials are. It’s truly a weird thing, with properties I wanted to harness. Not to fight Superman, I frankly am one of his fans, my daughter is, and so are my grandchildren. But... well, can you imagine? Nuclear reactors could run off of the stuff and it wouldn’t be toxic, even if it had a meltdown.

“There was so much _opportunity_ , there, and... I never asked questions about it. I did research, I won _awards_ for my studies into the material, what it could be used for, how to harness the energy efficiently. Lex, he supplied it to me, I didn’t really ask questions because he was my boss and he seemed, despite his flaws, like a good person. I didn’t think about what _he_ would do with my research. Do you know what he did?”

“Made weapons,” Addy said, because it was the truth.

Emil nodded. “I... gave Lex too much benefit of the doubt,” he continued, lips pursing. “It was always ‘he grew up in a family with those types of values’, ‘he just has concerns about aliens’, a lot of excuses because to ask otherwise would impact my career. I was willing to pretend he was _just_ a bit bigoted about things, that he was _just_ irrationally afraid, that he wouldn’t do anything about it. That he was all bark, no bite.

“Sure proved me wrong though, didn’t he? As a last hurrah, the man turned our sun red. Had he messed that process up, he could’ve kickstarted the rapid inflation of the sun itself and swallowed the earth. I _enabled_ that, and well, I couldn’t after that.”

Addy blinked, long and slow, processed that. No, maybe she had been looking at things wrong—this... wasn’t a team of people who were threats. She could find out more, later, and she would, but he sounded remorseful. Genuinely torn up about his part in that, and he had given it all to her with little prompting, like he was looking for a way to be judged. Or maybe to repent.

She wasn’t sure how to feel about that, what part she could even play in it, but it was... something. It was more than she was expecting, it was something Kara would probably be happy about. Something that maybe she should be happy about.

“Alright, you two!” Serling called out, breaking the quiet atmosphere. “How’s the simulation?”

“Like it always is, it _should_ run right,” Emil called back, glancing over the back of his chair. Addy stared at the screen for a few more moments, getting nothing out of the scrolling text or endless variables.

“Well, let's get this started, then?”

Addy let herself follow the wave, shuffling back up to the window with Emil in tow. Serling and June stood further away, clearly not fully recovered from the explosive result the first time, and Emil took up his spot as the switch flipper again. The laser pointer, still in place, had its port opened for a second time, and then, finally, Emil reached out and flicked the test room’s outlets on again.

For a moment, nothing happened. All there was, was that whine of electrical current, the faint feeling that the air was being charged with something.

Then, just barely perceptible, the laser flickered.

Serling burst out in a cheer.

* * *

“So, how was work?”

Addy paused, a chunk of oats and calories as demanded by two actual doctors - Eliza and Alex - half-way to her mouth. Kara, across from her, had since demolished her potstickers and other assortments of food, and had been waiting patiently for her to finish as well.

Or, at least, as patient as Kara could be in the first place.

“Good,” Addy replied finally, a bit startled by the fact that she believed it. She still needed to do more research, but nothing from them in person set her off. Nothing about them made her feel unwanted, or disliked, or isolated, or even that they might have less than generous intent for her or anyone else.

Kara smiled, one of those bright, happy ones, all dimples and teeth. “That’s good! I’m glad, really. Like, it’s lonely with you and Winn gone, and finding Cat’s new assistant is sometimes like pulling teeth, but, I’m really happy for you.”

“New assistant?” She knew Kara’s job was in flux, but to what ends she wasn’t sure.

Kara shrugged. “Think her name is... Eve Tess? Something like that? She’s the newest one. A bit ditzy, in-her-own-head, but she seems good enough.”

“Is good ever enough for Cat Grant?” Addy asked, genuine.

Kara boggled, then burst into a fit of laughter. “Very true! But, ah, I think she can do it. You know how you can sorta _know_ when people have a bit of steel under there? That they’re more than just who they are?”

Not even a little, but Addy kept her silence on that front, going back to her food.

For a while, she just ate, taking tiny bites out of her oat bar, chewing, swallowing. Working through the mechanics. She might not like it, but she knew it was necessary, and she was, a little, starting to come around to the taste of things. They weren’t _that_ bad, just a little sweet, and at least the texture was crumbly in all the right ways.

They were okay.

“I realized I’m proud of you, and that was making me afraid,” Kara piped up without notice, voice a bit solemn.

Addy paused again, swallowing what was already in her mouth, eyes turned towards Kara.

“It was like, I was so proud of you—you’re finding your own place, your own interests! You’re really assimilating, or at least finding your own little nook. I think, though, that I didn’t want to be proud, you know? I wanted to protect you.” Kara paused for a moment, laughing awkwardly. “At some point you, I think, became to me what I am to Alex. It was just easier to be your protector, but you’re growing up. It was wrong of me to... try to force the issue, you know? To try to get you to reconsider. These are your choices, and you should be able to make them, for better or for worse.”

“It’s okay,” Addy mumbled, because it was about the best she could do. She felt squirmy, like she wanted to go roll around on her bed to work the feelings out. Maybe she would, but later. “I wanted to protect people too.”

“Mh,” Kara hummed, leaning back in her chair. “Stronger together, yes?”

Addy mimicked her hum in turn, an agreeing hum. A thought tugged at her though, poking and prodding, and she paused.

“Kara?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think Lena Luthor would make a scientific research team full of washed-up or almost super villains?”

Kara stared at her for a moment. “Addy, I just said how proud I was of you about making your own choices, and I stand by that, but this is worrying me.”

“No, they’re good people, I think.” She was really going to have to ambush one of them to do a more deep dive into their minds. Skimming off the top of memory for human brains was a difficult measure, as they had an unfortunate habit of binding certain memories to emotional and physical reactions. Sure, she might be able to hear what people were thinking at that moment, or even slowly fish for other memories, but that was... slow. She should be able to remove the memories of her doing it, too. “There was just a lot of stories about Superman breaking their stuff.”

Kara opened her mouth, paused, then shut it. “Well, everyone deserves a second chance, right?”

Addy glanced down at herself, at her hand, at her arm and her body and all the things she’d gained. Kara, a new home, a job, people to talk to, friendships.

She tilted her head, swallowing the last of her dinner.

“Maybe you’re right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, this fought me. It was so stubborn, and I'm not even entirely sure if I'm totally good with how it came out, but my head is kinda foggy and I just hope at this point it still tracks.
> 
> Anyway, next chapter and we're off to the main plot! Woo. Yay.


	32. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy critiques space flight and general human ineptitude.

Addy, in her own opinion, had become something of a morning rush expert. It was a matter of highly particular partitioning of one’s time, ensuring you moved between goals at exactly the right time with little room for breaks in between. It meant her mornings could be as productive as possible while also never running the risk of being late unless outside interference took place.

The same, however, could not be said for Kara.

Addy watched from her seat at the kitchen, Kara flitting between the furniture in the apartment, just a little too fast to be altogether human. Her hair, fluffy, fell in loose waves around her face, messy and unstyled unlike how it so often was.

Wet droplets of water still dripped down the back of Addy’s neck, a little cool. Her hair, by contrast, was still in a towel, drying steadily after it’s post-shower tending to. Managing one’s curls was a larger endeavour than Taylor had led others to believe, in part because ‘messy curly hair’ tended to be ‘horrific mats that you need scissors to get rid of’, as evidenced by several surprisingly traumatic incidents from Taylor’s time in elementary.

She would, rather honestly, not have to revisit it, so she had taken to a hair-care routine that involved a lot of pampering and uncomfortably expensive products. Sometimes, she wished she could just shear it short, but then she didn’t really like the thought of that much, either. She liked it long, however tangly it might threaten to be with little impetus.

“You don’t understand Addy,” Kara was saying, dragging her from her thoughts. She was flicking back and forth, splotches of colour appearing and vanishing in her hands as she blurred from place to place. “I have _never_ been late. Ever.”

Addy hummed, understandingly. That deserved some approval. “Good work ethic,” she voiced.

Kara startled to a halt, head whipping around to stare at her. For a moment, there was something mutinous in that expression of hers, flecked with playful annoyance. Kara could always be a bit slow on the uptake for social norms, Addy knew, but this time around it only took her a few seconds to realize the sincerity of her words. A blush freckled her cheeks, awkward. “Well, thank you. I am very proud of it! Which is why I can’t be late today, and, actually, speaking of, don’t you have work too? You said something about your commute being long the last few times.”

Her eyes tracked off to the side, glancing over the clock. Not even six-thirty in the morning yet. She had long since adjusted her commute to account for side paths, alleyways, and a few pedestrian bridges, which had cut down on the amount of time she actually had to take to get into the inner city. “I found ways to manage that,” as she always would, and always had.

“If you say so,” Kara mumbled, blurring back out of sight, though this time she didn’t re-emerge from the confines of her bedroom. There was some rummaging, noises Addy could just barely pick up on, alongside Kara’s increasingly annoyed muttering. She wasn’t going to get anything done if she became too angry or frustrated.

That, simply, would not do.

“How are things at CatCo?” Distracting Kara with CatCo-related trivia and knowledge had always worked in the past. Day or night, Kara was unreasonably proud of her job and where it had gotten her. Addy didn’t quite get it, but then she was relatively sure her track record with adhering to the rules of her superiors was, at best, somewhat concerning.

“Oh!” Kara’s voice carried a bit, echoey from the distance. She sounded like she was in the bathroom, and the sound of running water was quick to confirm that. “The new IT girl we got in? She’s good! Not as good as you or Winn, of course, but good. Mainly, I think she’s just... really socially awkward. Not like Winn is awkward, either, but like—she reminds me of a _cat_ , and she drinks way too much coffee. Oh, and Eve’s doing a whole lot better.”

That was a fair amount of information. The IT person they’d hired was working out well, that was good, though she did wonder what it was about computer science that attracted generally awkward people. Winn was hands down easily the most awkward person she met, even if he made it slightly more palatable by being an otherwise nice person to be around.

Addy called back for a moment, drumming up the memories of when Kara had last mentioned Eve—something about her being Cat Grant’s new secretary. “Eve Tess?” She tried.

“Eve _Teschmacher_ ,” Kara corrected. Addy tried the word in her mouth a few times, not vocalizing it, just letting her lips and tongue go through the movements.

What a wonderful word. _Teschmacher_.

“She’s the only one out of the fifteen we interviewed and did testing on who could meet Cat’s expectations without breaking down in tears,” Kara continued, clarifying.

There was a pause, the squeak of a knob as the trickling water turned off.

“Too often, anyway.”

Kara emerged, then, hair was done up in that ever-present ponytail of hers. She paced over to the table next to the television, lifted her thick, black-framed glasses up off of it, and slid them up the bridge of her nose. Both hands came up to fiddle with the corners, where the arms of the glasses met the framing of the lenses. “So, how do I look?”

Tracking her eyes down, Addy did her best to observe without a bias. Kara was wearing one of those button-up pale-blue striped shirts she was so fond of, with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She had dark-ish waist-high jeans on, not quite black, but close, looped through with a distinct brown leather belt, iron buckle gleaming in the early dawn light. On each foot, already prepared for her trek outside, were a pair of shiny black loafers.

“Acceptably colourful,” Addy conceded.

Kara’s face lit up in a broad smile, reaching back to fiddle with her ponytail a bit. It looked awfully tight on her head, but then Addy had come to realize she could barely tolerate wearing a loose ponytail, to forget about the tight, highly professional ones Kara tended to go with.

Kara leaned over, reaching for her bag, which she scooped up, slipped up and over her shoulder. She spared another glance up at the clock, mouth twisting up. “I gotta go,” she said quickly, glancing back her way. “I’ll see you later!”

Then she was off.

* * *

The lab room was forever in flux, as far as Addy could tell. For a multitude of reasons, sure, but it was frequent enough that it had become something of its own normal.

The window into the testing room had been changed, taped up around the edges by yellow-and-black tape, with stripes. There was a warning label on the bottom left of the window, half of the transparent border curling upwards, ready to be peeled, but without anyone bothering to do so.

Below it, a milk crate-sized box was propped up on one of the fold-out, single-person metal tables you could find in nearly every storage room in the building, letting it fit perfectly up against where the porthole was, giving it direct access.

“Testing hypothesis four,” Emil announced, voice prim.

“With added protection,” June cut in, voice cheeky, not that Addy could blame her.

Where there had once been a switch to turn the testing room on, there was now a long series of rubber-wrapped wires connecting up to it, the switch having been pulled apart and replaced with a larger plug. The cords led back a solid 20 feet, winding up along the back of a terminal similar, but cruder, than the ones they used downstairs to show off the building layout, among other things. On the screen, there were a series of indicators, windows and settings, a bunch of things Addy had only started to familiarize herself with.

Addy’s eyes panned to Emil, who was standing firmly behind the terminal, a bandaid plastered along one cheek, not quite covering up the cut that reached nearly up to his cheekbone. Addy couldn’t blame him for wanting to put some more distance between himself and the testing room. Especially after last time.

Her eyes switched to the next new addition: a rather worn-looking corkboard. On it, there were three signs, delightful indicators: ‘0 days since the last technical failure’, ‘0 days since our last noise complaint’, ‘0 days since Lena had to be called’. They were wonderfully useful indicators, to help show whether or not they were at risk of losing their jobs for a more risky testing attempt, but then Addy had to wonder how Serling had already had the entire thing ready. It seemed like it had been in use for more than a few years, at this point.

There was likely a story behind that, but she couldn’t dwell on it. She had a job to do.

“With added protection,” Emil agreed, sounding a bit more confident. He reached forward, tapping quickly along the screen, initiating.

Inside the testing room, a solid beam of light flickered into being again. It was bright, bright in the sort of way that was like looking dead into the center of the sun. To her right, Serling, tablet in hand, pointedly looked away, reaching up with her free arm to shield her eyes, while the others did the same.

Addy knew better than to flinch at the light though. It could, simply, not hurt her, and she saw no reason to lower her chance of noticing something by merely looking away. That sounded an awful lot like admitting defeat.

“Stop looking at the light, Addy,” Emil’s voice chimed in, exasperated. Tired. They’d had this conversation before, not that Addy ever agreed with him. “You’re getting eye damage. Get a pair of shaded goggles, we have them for a reason.”

Still, the superior’s orders were the superior’s orders. Addy cast her gaze down, staring at her own hand. “I don’t like how they feel behind my ears.” The rubber sort of stuck to her skin, it was unpleasant, a chafing sort of pain that didn’t really need to be doing damage to feel uncomfortable.

“On three,” Emil said, rudely not responding to her very genuine and worthwhile critique of their awful goggles.

Silence overtook them all. From June, who was standing to her left, to Sterling. Addy breathed out through her nose, blinking the remainder of the black spots from her eyes.

“Two.”

“Oh,” Serling cut in, sounding a bit hesitant, at about the same time Emil said “one”. “I think I had a carryover error.”

There was a _thoomp_ , a heavy, breezy sort of noise as the field inside of the testing room kicked in without warning. The intense glare of light dimmed, and Addy drew her gaze up, catching sight of the beam of light they were using to test it. It was flickering, dimming, and dispersing in a way that was uncomfortably similar to CO2 going supercritical in a pressurized environment. Light was, as far as Addy had ever been made aware, probably not supposed to do that.

Still, nothing else happened. A few seconds ticked by.

“Huh,” Serling mumbled, Addy glancing over to watch her brows bunch together. “Maybe everything _is_ alright. Should I redo my—”

There was a sharp, painful _crack_ that filled the room. Addy swivelled, catching sight of others doing the same. The glass window they had just gotten installed not a few hours ago had a huge, imposing crack down the center of it, a crack which was branching out like tongues of lightning, filling into a spiderweb.

Addy wasn’t sure who shrieked. It could’ve been Serling, it could’ve been June, it almost certainly was Emil, but before she could witness science in action, Serling had grabbed hold of her good arm, wrenched her down, and blocked her line of sight just as there was a thunderous noise, accompanied by the immediate shattering of glass.

Unlike last time, none of it was launched at them like ballistic shrapnel.

Addy peeked her head up, wrenching her arm free of Serling, who was staring at her like she was a moron, just in time to watch the metal shutters - installed in every testing space, presumably - slam shut over where there had once been a glass window, and for the ever-annoying squeal of the lab breach alarm to flare to life. The lights above darkened, turned red, and she could hear the telltale click of the door behind them being locked and pressurized shut. There was a heavy _sput_ as, within the testing room, custom sprinkles disgorged an endless fountain of fire-dousing foam and other chemicals to ensure anything that might be on fire wasn’t, and anything that might be hazardous would be covered in enough material to block or dampen its effects on the environment.

“I think that’s a new record.”

“Serling, that is not a good thing.”

“But, like, two glass windows in two days.” Serling made a gesture in the direction of the metal shutters, hauling herself to her feet. “That has to count for something.”

“It might count towards Luthor Corp’s insurance fees,” Addy pointed out. It was, after all, pertinent information.

* * *

Lunch had become something of a way to explore new food choices. That, in part, was due to Luthor Corp’s surprisingly expansive cafeteria area, which claimed to provide food for just about every culture, with just a few exceptions.

Today, for example, she had finished off a shawarma. What exactly had gone into it, Addy didn’t know. The thing about it was that it tasted good, but the texture was... mixed. The meat was nice, chewy in just the right way, and the vegetables gave some nice crunch, but the thing they’d wrapped it all in had gotten weighed down by dressings or sauces and had gotten soaked, turning vaguely gritty and unappetizing as a result. That, perhaps, came down to the fact that she was not a quick eater, but if they could not account for it, then maybe it simply wasn’t for her.

The lockdown had since been lifted, obviously, as evidenced by her food. The ‘days since Lena had to be called’ had a shiny new ‘-1’ attached to it, and the repair team had already been in to drop off a modular glass window which they could install and pressurize within half an hour at the maximum. A lot of the building had incorporated modular design in a few ways, and Addy was rather fond of that. For now, though, the window was now merely covered over by a large blue tarp, taped up around the edges to keep it from falling and showing off the mess of jagged glass spikes, or what was left of the original window. 

The rest of the team, of course, had finished lunch well before her. June and Serling were fiddling around with the robots again, having unpacked them from the cardboard boxes they put them in whenever they went home without them. Emil was over near another new addition to the space: a television, sat in front of the couch, upon which was the ongoing Venture launch.

Now, not to belabour a point, but Addy was not particularly fond of the hype around the Venture’s launch. It was, as with most things made on Earth, a crude approximation of spaceflight primarily evolved from the act of literally blasting oneself into space. With that said, though, everyone else she knew was varying levels of interested, and Kara, at the very least, was _very_ interested, almost to the point of concern. She’d likely want to talk about it, about everything, which left her with really only one choice.

Shutting her laptop, Addy rose from her seat, leaving her bag behind. She wandered over, slipping past June and Serling, currently embroiled in an argument over whether or not projectiles were useful in a melee-heavy combat robot, and made her way over to the couch. Emil turned to smile at her when she arrived, waving his fingers quietly as she settled down into place on the opposite end of the couch.

“History in the making,” Emil said, and there was a note of profound pride in his voice.

Addy, very smartly, kept her commentary to herself.

The launch, as per the news narrator and her own ability of observation, seemed to be going well. They had gotten past the first major difficult part of any space launch, that being escaping the planet itself. They were about to enter low orbit at this rate, not that they were going to get much further than that. The first commercial space flight it might be, but it wasn’t trying to slingshot to the moon or anything like that. No, for now, it was just a very, very excessive airplane.

Still, it was to the news credit that they could track this at all. Addy was assuming drones were involved, the crystal clear image of the spacecraft above a sea of clouds, growing further and further away as time went on, was not something you could get with a telescope or something like that.

“I wonder if the military’s involved with this,” Serling mused, her voice suddenly rather close to Addy. She resisted the urge to jump or flinch, and merely turned, a bit stiffly, towards Sterling, who was squinting at the screen, leaning on the arm of the couch just next to her. Personal space was not something Serling was too good with, but this was enough distance. Addy could just do without her walking around that quietly; this made the _third_ time Serling had startled her.

“I can’t see the civilian media having access to drones of this calibre,” Addy said, at last, turning back to the screen. The spacecraft was barely a glint now, recognizable from a distance but only with vague, indistinct shapes.

Without missing another beat, the tail end of the spacecraft lit up like a small fireball.

Emil made a choked-off noise, horrified. Addy wasn’t really sure _what_ to feel, as while she wasn’t a fan, she had _certainly_ not wanted it to fail.

“And this, my friends, is why I’ll never trust us, no matter how beneficial it might be, to make a space elevator,” Serling cut in, sounding altogether very proud of her assessment. “Imagine that, but wrapping around the earth all at once. Mass devastation. Hey, June, come look at this! We’ve got a space titanic in the making!”

“...The Doctor Who epi—oh god you meant literally.”

June packed in next to Serling, staring at the screen. Emil, to Addy’s side, was leaning forward, hands braced tightly around his knees, looking genuinely worried. Serling, despite the macabre language, wasn’t looking very happy about the Venture’s failure either.

Couldn’t she help, though? This was something Kara would want to be involved in, right? She wasn’t sure if she had the sheer strength to prevent something like that from plummeting out of the sky entirely, but it was—

Wait. She’d decided against taking her costume to work unless she knew she had D.E.O. related things to do not long after. It was at home, and if she flew out over there, she probably wouldn’t have enough time to get back and fly up to prevent it from turning into a huge fireball.

She tried a few other ideas, thinking, ways to avoid having her identity leaked to the press. There wasn’t much she could do, nothing really at all that she could do with the restricted amount of time and—

“Addy?” It was Emil, and his voice was... worried. She glanced towards him, blinking away the thoughts and routes she’d just run through.

The others, actually, were looking at her too. Had she said something she was thinking, just then? She certainly hoped not, as that was an information breach she was pretty sure J’onn was not about to let her live down. Not after the whole mathematics equation, anyway.

Before she could say anything, though, her phone bleeped. It was a special sort of bleep, one she reserved for the D.E.O.’s various contacts. It set it apart from Kara sending her a lunchtime text, which could be responded to with less urgency. The others were looking at her phone, too, on its place on the table.

It bleeped again. Louder.

Addy rose to her feet, shuffling past Serling and June - who, for whatever reason, were giving her a wide berth - and navigated towards her phone. She unlocked it with her passcode, brought up the text.

_Supergirl is handling it. D.E.O. base ASAP._

_\- J’onn._

Well. That was succinct, but then that was part of the reason why she liked J’onn so much.

Drawing her gaze back up, Addy blinked. The others were still staring at her, silently. “I have to go,” she said, at last, trying not to let the confusion show through in her words.

Emil... frowned? Sympathy? Addy knew she wasn’t perfect at reading expressions, but surely that wasn’t right. “I’m sure Superman or Supergirl will save them,” he said, gently.

Which, obviously? She nodded, still, but that was pretty clear, wasn’t it?

“You can go, by the way,” Emil blurted, glancing furtively towards Serling and June. Serling’s odd, justified expression had soured into something more sombre. June just looked sad. Addy didn’t get it. “We won’t be getting much done today, but uh, you’ll have to catch up on number-crunching tomorrow. Might have to stay late, but you know how it is.”

She did not, but the way his voice was wavering meant he was trying to be humorous, so she simply nodded, acknowledging that this was just one of those things she wouldn’t get. “Okay.”

* * *

The D.E.O.’s main headquarters were an open, airy sort of thing. They had a balcony without much purpose other than to act as a landing zone for Kara and herself, and it was a rather wonderful thing not to have to fly halfway out into the Californian desert to get to the D.E.O.

Two soldiers jostled awkwardly as she landed, glancing her way, hands cupping large assault rifles slung over their chest. Once they caught sight of her costume - the brief detour to get it back home had been, unfortunately, necessary, and had resulted in her not actually helping stop the crash any - the vaguely-hostile looks bled away, and they were nodding her through.

Addy descended the flight of stairs, down beneath the overhanging, indoor balcony, and towards the new command center. There was a crowd there, two dozen or so people, which had parted down the center, clearly to let people through. Kara was there, standing next to Winn, smiling smugly at him, while Clark - and that was a surprise, she thought he would’ve headed back to Metropolis after all of this - had wrapped Alex up in a hug.

Heads swivelled as she walked, her shoes tap-tap-tapping against the floor, echoing. J’onn smiled her way, a bit strained, and was eclipsed thoroughly by Kara’s smile, raising both of her thumbs in a half-dance like motion, clearly excited. Clark extricated himself from Alex’s grip, turning towards her.

His smile was soft, gentle, made his eyes crinkle just a little bit. “Administrator,” he greeted. Very professional, she approved.

Addy bobbed her head. “Superman. Good job.” Approval was always a good thing, and the thing was, he and Kara had done a good job. What snippets she had picked up when back at home had shown Kara and Clark stopping the spacecraft with sheer strength and flight alone, plopping it down in the outskirts of east Georgia. Apparently, officials still weren’t too sure how they were going to, you know, get it out of there, but for what it was worth, they had done well.

Clark turned, then, eyes shifting towards J’onn. The atmosphere - and Addy still wasn’t sure how that worked - _plummeted_. His smile became fixed, strained, before dropping off entirely, not even pretending at the pretense of the thing. J’onn stared back, steely, nothing like the warm-smiled man Addy had come to really appreciate.

Something was afoot. Something she would not tolerate.

“J’onn,” Clark greeted, flat.

“Superman,” J’onn replied in turn, shifting back on his heels. He was dressed in full black military fatigues, as Addy had come to find was his most common form of dress overall. “Nice to see you again.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Clark chided, voice strained. “I won’t be staying long.”

Okay. What was going on? Addy’s pace slowed to a halt, arriving next to Kara, with who she shared a confused look.

“I uh, just invited Superman to touch base, you know?” Kara tried, voice somewhat weak and awkward.

“Quite the base,” Clark chided, voice darkening. “Lead-lined walls, stores of kryptonite...”

J’onn sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Follow me,” he said, at last, and it was as much a dismissal for the other agents as it was a command for them. The crowd dispersed quickly, and J’onn started off towards one of the corridors, Addy trailing after him and Clark, Kara taking up the rear.

Alex, though, was hanging back. She had Winn’s arm in a stranglehold, tight enough that it looked like it hurt, and he was staring, betrayed, at her. “Me and Winn,” she said, making most of them briefly pause. “Are going to stay back, see what we can find out about the Venture, right?”

Winn sighed, deep and heavy. “Yes ma’am.”

Turning away from that scene, Addy picked up her pace, Kara doing the same. They passed through one of the various, labyrinthine concrete hallways, leading around in what seemed like a bit of a spiral pattern. There was a sustained distance between herself and Clark, who was about five feet ahead, and Clark and J’onn, who was about five feet ahead of him. It was, speaking honestly, terribly awkward, and it got no better when they arrived at one of those sliding doors, which opened with a swipe of J’onn’s keycard, and were beckoned in.

The room inside was basic D.E.O. fare. Utilitarian, concrete, box-shaped, with ugly bright lights recessed into the roof to not give anyone even the chance of taking something like a light fixture to be used as a weapon. In the center of the room, a metal table was bolted in place on concrete floors, and a scattering of chairs surrounded it.

Addy chose the chair closest to the door, Kara the one across from her, while Clark and J’onn chose chairs as far away from one another as possible.

The doors slid shut behind them, clicking and hissing. Soundproofing, by Addy’s guess.

“Explain,” she said, and wasn’t about to take no for an answer.

Heads turned to her, and Clark opened his mouth.

“Addy, this isn’t your concern,” J’onn replied, voice tight. A topic he didn’t want to approach? Too bad.

“It has become mine. Explain.”

J’onn and Clark glanced at one another, a mixture of sizing each other up and looking for answers where there likely weren’t any.

Clark was the one to break the silence. “I disapprove of the D.E.O.,” he explained, voice weary, but stern. “The stores of kryptonite, the trend of unethical detention of anyone they even remotely disapprove of. It’s the reason why I don’t work for them, you know, aside from Cadmus.”

Addy might not like kryptonite _either_ , but she saw the value. “Kryptonite is needed if there are enemies who are vulnerable to it,” she explained succinctly. Because it was the truth.

“No, I don’t think you get it,” Clark said, voice reedy with annoyance. He breathed in, took a moment, and recaptured his composure. “They had kryptonite before—before Zod, before Non or Fort Rozz. I was the only one it could affect, and because of them _Lex_ got his hands on kryptonite and learned to recreate it.”

That... well, brought up a point. Clark didn’t know about her working for Lena, yet, did he? Let alone that she was working in her investigative sciences research team. On alien tech. She caught sight of Kara, face waxy and a bit more pale, looking worriedly at her, and if she wasn’t wrong, Kara had probably just realized the same thing.

This probably wasn’t the time for that reveal, though.

“That was not his fault,” Kara started, each word slow and careful. “Lex had kryptonite even before Jeremiah got involved in any of this—it’s _Hank Henshaw_ who is at fault, not J’onn.”

“Yet J’onn still runs it,” Clark pointed out stubbornly, chin jutting a bit.

There was a tense silence, tight. J’onn grit his jaw, stared flatly at Clark across from him. “The kryptonite stays, Superman.”

“Then that’s how it is,” Clark rebuffed, arms folding over his chest, tightening down.

Kara looked... torn. Twisted up by the entire thing. Her eyes kept glancing between J’onn and Clark, lips pursing, fingers tapping on the table in silent rhythms. Addy knew they all disliked kryptonite for one reason or another, but she was relatively sure her reasoning wasn’t the norm. She disliked it, simply, because it was unpleasant to be around. They had described her reaction to it as ‘akin to an allergic reaction’, which was not too far off the mark. It hurt, it made her skin blister and her body shut down in ways she wasn’t comfortable with.

She knew it was different for Kara and Clark. Kryptonite was a weapon _for_ them, almost purpose-built for it. It had negligible effects on other living things, to the point where the type of radiation it emitted had confused scientists since its initial discovery. You could poison yourself with it, admittedly, but that itself was no easy feat, and at that point it was mostly due to the sheer quantity that was blocking up other essential systems of one’s biology.

But Addy was, well, _used_ to weapons being made for the specific purpose of killing her. She had done the same to other shards, and it was, by most metrics, how shard combat works. Specialize weapons, use them to shatter outer protections and penetrate inside to convert or mutilate and then convert. It was a simple game of creative cannibalism. This was nothing new to her.

“We can never be sure you’re the only ones left,” J’onn said at last, voice still so tight. “We have several Kryptonians in holding right now, though we’ve transferred them to red sunlight based containment. This isn’t accounting for the _six others_ who we have no location for nor much information on. The ones we do know about from the salvaged databases of Fort Rozz? One of them is the namesake of that prison, and half of the information on her has been redacted or encrypted so thoroughly that not even our tech experts can break it. Not even _Non_ was willing to let her loose, and she was located in the core of that prison, far away from any inmates but the worst of them, the most demonic. Tell me, Superman, do you want me to leave this world unprotected against that?”

“It is defended!” Clark burst, nearly rising from his seat. “By me—by _us!_ ”

“We can’t rely on you,” J’onn explained. “Not forever.”

Silence fell, then, as awkward and uncomfortable as the one that had fallen on the walk over. Addy felt out of place, awkward, beholden to dynamics she didn’t really see the point of. Both sides had merit—there was, quite truthfully, some logic to getting rid of the sole weapon which can inflict meaningful damage on your main source of manpower. There was, however, also the benefits of keeping it, of having arms and weapons ready in the event that someone else of similar biology sought to do damage to those involved with the D.E.O.

It was hard to choose a side, and more to the point, Addy didn’t want to.

The doors slid open behind them, breaking the silence and her thoughts. Alex was in the doorway, a tablet in hand, staring at the three of them with a face utterly masked in professionalism. Whatever she was feeling, Addy didn’t know. “We have updates,” she announced, stepping to the side to let Winn peek his head in through the slip of space, waving towards her.

Addy waved back.

“Fine, bring them in,” J’onn said, relenting. The conversation from before was clearly being tabled for the time being, and Addy noticed Clark relaxing, however minutely.

Alex and Winn entered, the door slipping shut behind them. Alex prowled up to the front of the table, Winn following on after her, giving Superman a look Addy... wasn’t really sure she wanted to decipher. Worship? It was something like that. She didn’t want to see Winn looking at people that way. It was icky.

“The company behind the Venture said there was an explosion when the ship reached low orbit insertion, and wasn’t a technical failure that only kicked in sometime later,” Alex started, glancing around the room.

Kara, almost awkwardly, raised her hand a little. “...So?”

She could answer that. “If something like that was going to fail,” Addy began, drawing gazes, confused ones. She felt vaguely offended by the notion she didn’t understand something as simple as _this_. “It would’ve done so during the launch period where it was escaping the atmosphere, there’s much more strain during that time.”

More staring. Addy felt heat crawl up her neck, she reached behind her to rub minutely at it. “It’s basic logic.”

“Anyway,” Winn cut back in, smiling at her. She appreciated it. “The Venture was built here in National City, so there are at least some opportunities to look into things.”

“What Agent Schott said is correct,” J’onn started, rising up from his seat, both hands planted on the table in front of him. He looked in command, in control of the situation, a leader. It was a good look on him, confidence had come more visibly to J’onn, now that he didn’t have to hide anymore. Or so Addy was thinking, anyway. “We should investigate this further.”

That earned at twitch from Clark, his face twisting, lips pursing. He was thinking rather hard for a few moments, before it was almost like a lightbulb went off above his head. “Maybe a mild-mannered reporter should make some inquiries while he’s here in National City, especially since I was going to head down here soon anyway.”

“Actually, I was going to have my team take a look at it,” J’onn cut in, voice dry and vaguely affronted.

“Well! Superman’s here, right?” Kara blurted, face flushed a little. “We should include him!” She sounded, actually, really excited. For what, well, Addy wasn’t sure. Clark was nice and all, but he could be a bit boring to be around.

“You can work out of CatCo!”

Addy knew plenty of reasons why that was a bad idea, and it took a few seconds for Kara to remember them too. As far as Clark knew, she was still working at CatCo as an IT tech. If Clark went to CatCo, she would undoubtedly have to explain to him why she wasn’t there right now, or would be there ever again.

She all but watched the colour drain out of Kara’s face. Kara laughed, high and awkward. “If—you, I mean—you don’t _have_ to—”

“No, no, that sounds like a good idea,” Clark agreed, bulldozing over the fragile resistance Kara had put up. He was getting to his feet, the chair clattering behind him as he started to turn towards the door.

Kara’s eyes flickered to her. A silent plea. One she normally would’ve responded to, all but thrown herself at to fulfil, but knew better. Kara had done this on her own.

That and she was not going to be the one to spring this on Clark.

Left out at sea, her pleas unreturned, Kara reached up to play with glasses that weren’t there, a nervous tic. “Well—uh!” Another nervous titter, awkward. “Just steer clear of Cat Grant, she’s been in a _mood_.”

Clark was already navigating towards the door, nodding at Alex as he passed, and Kara scrambled to chase after him, her cape fluttering errantly in the breeze. Clark had no idea what he had just released, no idea the sort of anxiety he induced by sheer proximity.

Maybe she could learn something from that.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got some sway with Cat Grant,” Clark’s voice called out, his body vanishing through the door and around the corner. Kara was quick to follow, not letting him get too far ahead.

The door slipped shut, leaving them all in silence.

Heads swivelled towards her again. Alex, Winn, J’onn, each one its own contrasting emotion. Alex had something like amusement tinged with dread in her expression, J’onn just looked tired, and Winn looked vaguely skittish, not that it was a particularly new look for him.

“I’m not sure what I’m less excited for,” Winn started with no small amount of false cheer. “Superman trying to exert his ‘sway’ over Cat Grant who, no offence, Kryptonian or not, is not someone you have _sway_ over.”

J’onn made a noise, agreeing. Everyone in the room had a close brush with Cat Grant once or twice, even Addy, and they knew better than that. Clark would learn, as they all had.

“Or,” Winn continued, voice drawing up into a squeak of horror. “When he finds out you’re working for Luthor Corp and did not even bother to tell him!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got distracted yesterday by a side-project (an alt power i kinda, stumbled onto more than anything else) and am putting some time away into. This is definitely still my #1 priority, but you may see another fic by me pop up in the... not near future, but well, sometime soon-ish? Kinda?
> 
> Anyway, here you are. Hope you enjoyed!


	33. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 6 - INTERLUDE 1 [KARA]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara saves a damsel in distress. 
> 
> It goes better than you'd expect.

Kara was certain she worked best when everything was chaotic.

This wasn’t to say that she enjoyed it—but it had been something of a trend in her life. Krypton’s destruction, the loss of Jeremiah, the death of her classmates in high school. It had felt, oftentimes, like a never-ending cascade of one world-shaking problem after the next, forever on the back foot trying to subvert them. Still, she had learned to adapt.

Being Kryptonian, in a way, also helped here. The fact of the matter was that she had been raised differently from the rest of the people she knew. Noticing small things was an essential skill every Kryptonian child needed to develop, as in Krypton, there were no massive displays of affection - outside of very specific circumstances - not like there were on Earth. Krypton was a place of subtleties, small gestures. Of glancing touches, the slightest slant of the mouth.

She had been bad at it, back on Krypton. She’d never captured the subtleties of expression as her similar-aged cousins had, but on Earth? An unsubtle Kryptonian she might be, but it was nothing to scoff at.

...Of course, the issue here was that what were subtle indications of distress to a Kryptonian might be a show of hostile amusement to a human—but! That didn’t _reduce_ it any! She had learned plenty, she’d have you know.

Like, for example, how to lie.

“ _You were right to tell me to get a hotel and call Perry before I did anything else_ ,” Clark said, voice tinny over the line.

It was the day after the Venture crash, and the world wasn’t really taking it well. From where she was, standing on the sidewalk next to their destination, she could see that much. Televisions tucked away behind glass windows had the debacle featured on every news channel. She could hear, just down the street, two people talking about it even now, describing commercial spaceflight as ‘the next blimp’. For all that - thankfully - nobody died, the reputation of what was then not even a fledgling industry had taken a nosedive.

Kara kinda wished it hadn’t, seeing as she didn’t want to have to wait a few hundred years for people to forget about the Venture crash and try again.

“ _Kara_?”

Shoot. “Sorry,” she breathed, glancing around the sidewalk. “I was a bit distracted—you said 7:30, right?” Rao, she hoped he had. It would be completely exhausting if she was here an hour earlier than she should be. Especially because she was only here on the good graces of Miss Grant, who had, after getting over her annoyance about not seeing Clark Kent immediately - which, _gag_ , she wished people would stop hitting on her baby cousin in front of her - grown incredibly amused by the notion of—well, everything they hadn’t told Clark about yet, and had signed off on it under the condition that she tell her everything once they got back from it.

So, here she was, standing awkwardly in place as a CatCo not-quite-a-reporter because she still hadn’t decided what exactly she even wanted to do, now that Cat was putting her foot down and bumping her up from her assistant position. That was another thing hanging over her - which, just, lovely, absolutely amazing - and she was _kinda_ starting to have stressful dreams about it.

Wonderful.

“ _Yeah, I think I can see you now—_ ”

“Kara!”

She turned, off towards where the voice came from. She spotted Clark quickly, a smile pulled across his face, eyes crinkled at the edges. He shouldered through the crowd gently, before jogging over towards her, waving one hand. Pulled in by, if nothing else, his endless enthusiasm, Kara found herself waving back.

Her phone _beeped_ , the call ended, and she shoved it away in her bag with the rest of her supplies—of which there were several notebooks and pens, all branded with the CatCo logo, which had been handed off to her by Cat herself. Almost like she’d been marking her territory or something.

Because, you know. A cat.

It was funnier before she thought it.

Swivelling her head back around at the sound of heavy, plodding footfalls, Kara pushed a smile to her face. “Hey, Clark.”

He smiled back in return, pace dropping into a smooth walk as he came up to rest beside her. His body turned, and he glanced up. “So, this is certainly as intimidating as the Metropolis HQ.”

She followed his gaze, and couldn’t quite bring herself to object to that observation. Luthor Corp’s building towered, the tallest in its cluster of high-rises, looking as though it was mostly made up of glass. It was advanced, state-of-the-art, modern in a way that a few buildings near it had yet to update to.

It was do or die, at this point. Project Duck Duck Goose was a go.

This morning, Alex and Winn had gotten into contact with her, going over possible leads. The main and primary one was that Lena Luthor had been scheduled to be on the Venture launch, but had been the sole no-show, and that one of Luthor Corp’s many subsidiaries had been the one to make the part that had exploded in the first place. Which, _of course_ that would be how things panned out. It would be the one commercial tech company in National City that Addy worked at. The one place with the sordid history.

Of course it would be.

But, sending in Clark on his own was a recipe for its own sort of disaster, and had made this unavoidable. She had to plan, in other words. At that, she hadn’t had much time to plan, either, barely an hour.

See, she wanted to tell Clark about what happened in the first place. About Lena, about Addy’s interest in tech, about a bunch of other things that she could benefit from out of this arrangement. But, with this unavoidable road bump in their way, she was going to have to do it _after_ they interviewed Lena Luthor. She also needed to tell him about Cat Grant knowing her identity, because if he had told her at any point in time they were related, well, he’d just also accidentally outed himself, which was probably less than great.

This just meant that she had to avoid Addy, which wasn’t normally a difficult thing to do. Kara could hear her now, that crystalline tinkling indicating... she was pretty sure curiosity, though it could be happiness mixed with a note of annoyance. The only problem was, the area was dense enough that she couldn’t really tell where Addy _was_ in the building, not to mention the tech which was also negatively impacting her ability to hear her. She knew Addy worked in the sub-levels, and they were going to the very top, so it shouldn’t be too hard, right?

“You ready?” Clark asked, nudging her with his shoulder. He had a knowing smile on his face, and Kara was pretty sure he thought she was nervous about meeting a Luthor.

He would, if he thought that, be very, very wrong.

* * *

Much like finding Clark among a crowd of people, finding Lena Luthor was surprisingly easy.

She stood out among the endless throng of semi-professionally dressed peers, both in features and distinct clothing choices. Kara had seen pictures of the woman before, but there was something of a dimension lost in the static shots she’d looked over. She was leaning over a desk, speaking enthusiastically to a dead-eyed looking guy in his mid-to-late 20s, with a name tag that read ‘KELSO’ pinned to his chest. He looked utterly absent from the conversation, not that it appeared to be bothering Lena any.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about her was that Lena Luthor looked in every way _put together_. Sleek and purposefully designed, with tailored clothing and the occasional splash of colour. Business chic, but taken to its logical conclusion and mastery. Her hair was dark brown, dark enough that without a source of light, it looked black. Her lips were painted a similar crimson red to her shirt, a black coat thrown over the top of it. Her heels looked quite literally painful to wear, and she was holding a bag between her forearm and bicep that Kara was relatively sure was worth more than most of her year’s earnings.

Clark pulled ahead, drawing her from her thoughts. She scrambled after him, not sure exactly why her mind got tangled up, but unwilling to make a scene out of it. She felt almost like she was being dragged along. She tried to match his pace, long strides of her leg, back straight, just the way Miss Grant taught her, but she wasn’t sure if it really helped.

Lena turned, then, away from Kelso and towards them. Her eyes flicked towards Clark, and there was a very visible moment where her face cramped. Stiffened. “My first appointment, I’m assuming?” She had a slight accent, so faded Kara couldn’t put a location to it.

“You’d be correct. I’m Clark Kent, from the Daily Planet.”

“I know who you are, Mr. Kent,” Lena drawled, though there wasn’t much in her tone. No anger, no fear, no annoyance. “We met at Lex’s trial.”

Clark opened his mouth, eyes tracking down to the notepad he had in his hand.

Lena raised up her own, palm forward. Clark’s mouth clicked shut, tensing with annoyance. “Wait until we’re at least in my office, please?”

Clark glanced towards her then, as though for guidance. She glanced back, unsure how to approach this, what the expected conduct of any reporter might be, and barely managed a haphazard shrug in turn. She turned back towards Lena, finding her several paces away, moving towards the elevators.

Kara paced forward, Clark at her side, the low murmur of conversation in the main foyer the only sound. Lena arrived at one of the elevators, slotting her card through a reader just next to the up and down buttons. The elevator behind her dinged, sliding open in an instant. She turned to them, then, motioning for them to follow.

Both herself and Clark did, packing away inside of the glass elevator. Lena input the topmost button, leaning back up against the wall, utterly silent.

The doors slipped shut, the elevator lurched, and then they ascended.

Kara kept her gaze fixed outside, watching the street below grow ever smaller, more ant-like. Clark, beside her, was fidgeting, thumb strumming along the rings of his notebook, foot slightly tapping up and down. Not enough to make sound, not for human ears, anyway, but enough for her.

He was antsy. She couldn’t really blame him.

“So,” Clark started, after another few moments of deafening silence. “Can I ask about why you weren’t on the Venture yesterday?”

Kara turned back, then, catching sight of Lena staring drolly at Clark. She opened her mouth.

The doors opened, revealing a long stretch of hallway. A secretary was tucked away just to the side of the last door, long black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Lena stepped out, into the hallway, and started walking, leaving both herself and Clark to scramble after her.

“There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I wasn’t aboard the Venture yesterday,” Lena started, walking at a crisp pace that seemed largely impossible in heels like that. Clark was keeping close behind her, his long strides matching her own, the secretary rising as they all passed her by, words forming on her lips.

Lena and Clark vanished around the corner, into the office.

“Well, that’s why—”

Kara, finally, entered in along with them.

It was Addy.

 _Of course it was Addy_.

She was standing in the middle of the office, awkwardly staring at the three of them. She had an oil-stained cardboard box under one arm, a lab coat thrown over her usual medley of colourful clothing, and tinted goggles she was currently using to keep the fringe of her hair out of her eyes, positioned up along her forehead. The thing that stood out about them was that it was clear that the tinted goggles had been modified, a new strap added where the old one used to be, made from completely different black plastic - rather than the slightly clear, white-ish plastic the goggles themselves were made from - with a cloth strap in place of something rubbery.

““Addy?”” Kara found herself saying at the same time Lena did.

The woman shot a glance back to her, eyebrow raising up nearly to her hairline.

Kara felt her face flush. “We’re roommates,” she explained.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Clark still staring at Addy. Processing.

Lena nodded, slightly, turning back to Addy. “What can I do for you, Addy?”

Addy glanced away from them, next, turning more officially towards Lena. She slightly cleared her throat, a very serious expression crossing her face. “I have been tasked by Emil to tell you, to quote, ‘we slagged the capacitor matrix and relays’, end quote.”

Lena sighed, though the noise was humorous, a bit of a grin tugging at her lips. “Bring it over to the desk,” she said, all but abandoning the two of them. Addy let herself be led, arriving at the desk and pulling the top flaps open to haul out a chunk of... something. Kara didn’t know nearly enough about technology to make heads or tails of it.

Lena reached towards her desk drawers, tugging one open and retrieving a pair of tweezers. She leaned over it, lips pursing in thought. “Did Serling do some of these modifications?”

Movement out of the corner of her eye. Kara glanced, caught sight of Clark silently mouthing “ _the nanobot lady?_ ”.

...Okay, then. She had no idea what _that_ meant.

Addy nodded, gesturing down at it. “She said she could do minor repairs, get it working more efficiently after our first blowout.” The rest of what she said, however, was mostly loss on Kara, as it devolved almost entirely into lingo. Complicated strings of words which, when put together, didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but Lena was nodding along, pointing out things on her own, gesturing, talking. Using words that Kara was certainly going to look up in a dictionary after this, if Clark gave her the time to, anyway.

What was distracting her more was the proximity. Addy was... particular about personal space. She had a bubble for most people that kept them outside of arms distance from her, never close enough to reach out and touch. Some people were exceptions, such as herself, Alex, Eliza, and to some extent Clark and Lois, though she knew them less, and thereby gave them less.

Apparently, she’d have to add Lena to the list, now. Lena was well within reaching distance of Addy, not quite the shoulder-to-shoulder proximity Addy gave _her_ , of course, but... it was closeness that was highly unusual for someone Addy didn’t know well. It bode well for the job, even Miss Grant hadn’t quite managed to get that close. Something about how she could behave to others with the right impetus had always made Addy give her a healthy berth of distance.

“So, if you reroute it like this, then this part is the new workable region?” Addy said, finally returning to English she could understand.

Lena turned to her, looking a bit shocked. “You extrapolated all of that from this?”

Addy, to her credit, merely blinked. Long and slow, cat-like, like she was silently judging your choices to voice something like that near her. “I excel at deduction.”

A smile - and was that... pride? - spread over Lena’s face. “Yes, you have it right. If you know that, you probably understand all of this just as well as I do, and I was the one to build it. I think you know what you need to do, then?”

Addy nodded, beginning to pack the hunk of metal back into the box.

“Oh, and Addy?”

She looked up again.

“Relay a message for Emil to me: he’s to make the walks of shame for the foreseeable future, alright?”

Addy’s capacity to impart emotion broke down at that, and Lena was rewarded with what Kara had come to learn was Addy’s utterly confused face: a complete, blank deadpan. “What’s shameful about this? Science is a matter of correcting mistakes.”

Lena almost chortled. Kara could hear the hitch of breath, _see_ the slight flutter of her chest. Lena was about to laugh deep from her chest. It broke the facade over its knee; took Lena down from her pedestal of perpetually-put-together into something more human, something Kara could more relate to and understand.

She felt something in her relax.

“Ask your coworkers, just, maybe try June first?” Lena offered, smiling gently. Addy nodded, mumbling something about ‘making a note of it’ and hefted her cardboard box again, quickly passing both herself and Clark by, vanishing back down the hallway without even so much as saying hello.

That probably meant she was... well, really invested in this.

That was a good thing. Such a good thing.

Less of a good thing was the way she could all but feel Clark staring holes into the side of her head.

“I apologize for that—Addy is one of my employees,” Lena began, settling down into the chair behind her desk with a soft noise, brushing her jacket off so that it laid splayed over the back. “She’s been working on the team I used to run for about a few weeks now. I gave her access to my office as needed because she’s easily one of the quickest learners I’ve had the pleasure to meet in my life, and it normally only takes her five or ten minutes to get her to understand something that might need a lecture otherwise.”

“No, it’s okay,” Clark said, surprising both herself and, from the look on his face, probably him too. Kara watched him for a moment, the visible signs of him slowly recollecting himself, refusing to let his mind jump to the wrong conclusions. He took a long, deep breath, and settled.

Look at her baby cousin go. She was so proud of him.

“To go back to my original question, why weren’t you there for Venture’s launch?”

Most of the time.

“Truthfully?” Lena leaned forward, easing her bag onto the desk. “There was an emergency regarding the planning ceremony I’m holding tomorrow. I’m renaming my family’s company, and I had to cancel.”

“Ah, lucky,” Clark drawled, not sounding very convinced by the matter. Kara felt the unceremonious urge to jab him in the side, to make this an _interview_ , rather than an interrogation.

For whatever reason, though, Lena laughed. It was a dry, humorous chuckle. “Lucky, Mr. Kent, is Superman saving the day.”

“Not something one expects a Luthor to say,” Clark replied, tone faux-amused.

Okay, so, a lot of the time he was still her baby cousin who puked all over her favourite dress. She knew for a _fact_ that this sort of tension was earning them absolutely nothing. Quick, what was a new topic but was still tangentially related to all of this?

Wait. Right. “And Supergirl was there too!”

The other two occupants of the room turned to look at her.

...She wasn’t sure if that worked or not, but at least it distracted Clark and Lena Luthor from their peacockish display.

Lena smiled, then, just a small thing. What made it stuck out was that it was genuine, an acknowledgement of something subtle. A thank-you, just with fewer words. “I know you’re Addy’s roommate, but I don’t know your name. Who are you?”

“Uh.” She hadn’t expected this to be turned onto her, to be quite honest. Was... was that protectiveness? In Lena’s tone? She couldn’t tell. “I’m—I’m Kara Danvers. I’m not with the Daily Planet. I’m with CatCo Magazine... sort of.”

“Is that where you met Addy?” Lena asked, sounding genuinely curious. “I know she worked there before—”

Why was she being the one questioned? This was not how this was supposed to go! “Well—no, we met through, uhm...” What could she even say? She couldn’t just say, ‘yeah, the alien detention agency I work for handed her off to me’. Colleagues? No, too distant. Wait, right, Addy was part of the family! There was a good angle! “We met through family friends!”

Clark stared at her, utterly deadpan.

...Right. Touchy topic. Right.

“I wasn’t aware the housing market in National City was this bad,” Lena said, sounding thoughtful. “Perks of being extremely wealthy, I suppose. I assumed I was paying Addy enough to get something at least decent... should I consider a raise, or?”

“Well—if you think she deserves it?” Kara hedged. Oh Rao, was this ever not her forte. Lena actually seemed to care about Addy, and she was feeling vaguely interrogated at this point. “But uh, we’re not roommates because it’s too expensive. We’re roommates because, well, living together helps both of us.”

It was nice, living with someone. She’d forgotten how much she missed it.

Understanding flashed over Lena’s eyes, and her posture relaxed, another smile toying at her lips. She had dimples, Kara was noticing. “Cherish that friendship, Ms. Danvers.”

...That sounded like a threat? Shouldn’t this be the other way around?

Clark cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Ah, right.” Lena regathered her attention on Clark, eyes finally drifting from her, the scrutiny she was under blessedly falling to the wayside. Not that it lasted very long, as her eyes were back on her barely a moment later, if without the same intensity. Kara was also noticing her eyes were very green, like, sea glass green. Gosh, she was intimidating. “But, then, CatCo isn’t known for this sort of journalism—I’m surprised you’re not asking about my outfit, or the cost of my bag.”

Kara, honestly, _did_ kind of want to ask about that! Just not for CatCo, and now _really wasn’t the time_ —

“I’m just tagging along today,” she decided on, instead. Miss Grant was never going to let her live this down, was she? She could already feel the blush settling in around her ears and cheekbones.

“Right,” there was a tone in Lena’s voice, something... not dismissive, but vaguely disinterested, as she turned her full attention onto Clark. “Let's speed this interview along. Just ask me what you want, Mr. Kent. Did I have anything to do with the Venture explosion?”

Clark smiled tightly. “Did you?”

“You wouldn’t be asking me if my last name was Smith,” she pointed out.

Clark nodded. “But it’s not. It’s Luthor.”

The tension was back, and Kara was finding herself to be very much not a fan of it.

Lena leaned back in her chair, a sigh pushing out through her lips. “It wasn’t always, I was adopted when I was four. The person who made me feel most welcome in the family was Lex, and then he went on his reign of terror in Metropolis.” She glanced away, turning towards the window, where National City stretched out below them.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kara glimpsed Clark pulling his glasses down, peeking over the rim. Oh, right, she should—probably check the place too. X-ray vision. She has that. She had become oddly calm and relaxed, and it sometimes took her reminding herself that Addy’s perception of ‘safe’ individuals and ‘things which interested her’ included examples of mother nature’s more violent tendencies. She couldn’t be too cautious.

Tugging her glasses down, she scanned over the room, peeking through objects, walls, everything.

There was, in fact, a whole lot of nothing. Not even something innocuously criminal, like a dime bag or something.

“He declared war on Superman,” Lena was saying, turning back towards them just after Kara dragged her glasses back up into place. “Committed unspeakable crimes.”

She turned, then, lifting a remote off of the table and pressing the power button. One of the screens, attached to the wall, lit up. A logo scrawled across it: a stylized ‘L’ overtop a smaller ‘Corp’. “When Superman put Lex in jail, I vowed to take back my family’s company. To rename it L-Corp.”

Wait, wouldn’t the L just... stand for Luthor? Well, she supposed it was the intent that counted, more than the logistics.

Lena turned, fully, back to them. She set the remote down, folded her hands, and gave them a long, probing look. “I’m trying to make it a force for good. I’m just a woman trying to make a name for herself outside of her family’s shadow. Can you understand that?”

Oh. There it is. The reason why she was so calm, so relaxed, around Lena Luthor. It clicked, the gears in her head started turning, oiled and aware. All the pegs fit into the right holes. It wasn’t just that Addy had ‘vetted’ her - and to what extent that vetting process amounted to much, Kara still wasn’t sure; for all she knew Addy could dismiss ‘world-conquering tendencies’ as an ‘interesting quirk’ - it was because, simply, she was relatable. Kara could see herself in Lena, or maybe it would be better said that she was what Kara could’ve seen herself become, in the abstract. Everything about Lena was built to climb out of the legacy of the people who came before her.

Of course she could understand that. She understood it so hard sometimes it _hurt_. “Yeah,” her voice came out weak, tremulous. A smile pulled at her face, and she didn’t resist it, even despite Clark giving her a wary look.

For a moment, Lena just stared at her, chin slightly tilted up, neck long. After a breath, she rose, walking towards one of her minimalist bookshelves. “I know why you’re here. It’s because a subsidiary of my company made the part that exploded on the Venture.” She reached forward, plucking one of the flash drives from a rack, turning back around and walking towards Clark, extending it out towards him. “This drive contains all the information we have on the oscillator. I hope it helps you in your investigation.”

Clark, carefully, took it. “Thank you.”

“Give me a chance, Mr. Kent, Ms. Danvers. I’m here for a fresh start, let me have one.”

For a moment, Clark just watched her, not saying anything. Finally, he tilted his head, a bare acknowledgement, but one nonetheless. “Good day, Ms. Luthor.”

Lena’s eyes turned to her, even as Clark started walking towards the door.

She smiled at Lena, bobbled her head in a nod. “I think you deserve a chance,” she said, as fast as she could, before taking off after her erstwhile cousin.

* * *

“Alright, so when were you going to spring it on me that Addy was working for Lena Luthor?”

They were walking, the streets mostly abandoned. Coffee shops flanked them on all sides, a tempting aroma that Kara couldn’t give in to, despite very much wanting a shot of caffeine.

“After you interviewed her,” she admitted. “I... also might need to tell you about some things?”

Clark turned to her, still walking, and squinted. “...Kara, you’re wearing the exact same expression you had when I found you, sixteen years old, waiting on my couch because you ran away from Midvale after you and Alex got into a spat. Lois still pokes fun at me for that.”

Oh boy. Embarrassing memories. So many embarrassing memories. “It was not, I’ll admit, the best way to meet your girlfriend.”

“Kara, what did you do?”

She let them walk in silence for a bit, glancing up at the clear sky.

“Cat Grant knows about my identity.”

“ _Kara!_ ” Clark yelped.

“What?!”

“You told her?!” his voice dropped into a near-whisper, almost a hiss.

Kara scowled. “No, of _course_ I didn’t tell her! She just figured it out!”

“Just, what if she leaks it?”

“She won’t.” Kara was pretty sure about that, too. “She helped a lot in the Myriad incident, she’s known since well before then too. If she wanted to release it, she would have by now.”

“...Alright, fine.” Well, at least they’d gotten that out of the— “Is there anything else I should know?”

Now that he said it, it felt like she was vaguely forgetting something? But, er, well. Best not to ratchet up that anxiety, any. “Not that I can think of.”

Clark just let out a sigh, reaching up to rub at the bridge of their nose. He didn’t, however, say anything else, and Kara let herself relax a little, walking silently alongside him down the winding streets of National City.

It was just that... well, the silence wasn’t _good_ silence. It was stiff, awkward, a lot of unspoken words hanging around. She wasn’t sure she could endure that. “So... what do you think?”

“I’ve learned through hard experience not to believe anything a Luthor says,” Clark replied tightly, still rubbing at his nose like he might be able to work the mental annoyance out.

Sucker’s bet on that. Kara had tried on more than one occasion with little effect.

Still, she couldn’t really just, y’know, _let that stand_. “Yeah, I know I’m not a reporter or anything, but I kinda believe her? I mean, even Addy vett—”

A phone rang, Clark’s in particular. He gestured at her to wait for a second, his pace slowing to a halt as he plucked the phone free from his pocket and brought it up to his ear. “Hi, sweetie. Yeah, I’m with Kara.”

He started walking again, Kara following after.

“Addy? Oh, we just saw her. You wouldn’t believe what Kara has to announce to—what? No. Addy didn’t ‘spontaneously give birth again’.”

They were getting stares at this point, a flush of humiliation crawling along Kara’s neck, up to her ears, making them burn hotly.

“Well—what do you mean _what else could it be_? She’s—no, not that either. No, she’s—wait, what do you mean burning? Lois? Of course I’ll be safe—I really want to know what’s _on fir_ —”

Clark brought the phone back from his ear, staring down at it. Kara peeked at it. Call ended.

“You’re still telling her,” Clark announced, after another moment.

Kara squawked. “Addy did the same thing to me about telling you! You can’t just, offload your responsibilities onto me!”

Clark just responded with a Look. One that made him look so much like his late father it almost hurt. Almost. It was mostly funny.

The giggles burst out of her chest, bringing relief. She felt her shoulders slouch, roll back, as she worked the nervous tittering out of her system. “I love that she worries about you, though.”

A smile crawled over Clark’s face in turn. “Yeah, me too.”

“I... I want to say I don’t know how you do it, but I think I’m starting to get it,” she admitted.

Clark just kept silent, walking alongside her.

“For a while, you know—I was caught up on James, but... I don’t know. Addy dropping into my life, it’s been different. I kinda found a new normal, a place for myself, you know?”

“If things are right, you’ll know it,” Clark agreed, still smiling.

They kept walking, then, in a more companionable silence. CatCo, one of the largest buildings in the city, grew just faintly visible from afar, standing apart from the rest of the skyscrapers by sheer height alone.

The relief from the home stretch was, very quickly, interrupted by her phone going off. Muttering beneath her breath, she grabbed it, flicked it on, and brought it up to her ear, ignoring Clark’s humorous smile. “Hello?”

“ _Lena Luthor wasn’t the culprit,_ ” Alex’s voice announced, sounding slightly panicked.

Kara turned to Clark, allowing herself a few gloating eyebrow waggles. He took his lumps humbly, rolling his eyes, but still listening in.

“ _The bomb was set under her seat on the ship. It was planted there to kill her. We need eyes on her, now._ ”

She glanced at Clark, but he was already on it. His gaze scanned back towards the L-Corp building, eyes narrowed.

“She’s... she’s heading towards the roof?” He said, sounding confused.

“ _There’s a registered helicopter landing up there_ ,” Alex cut in, apparently picking up enough noise to hear Clark. “ _There’s not many reasons you’d go up there otherwise. I need you two to be on it, whoever’s after her totalled a national project just to kill her. They’re not going to stop_.”

Clark looked at her, and she back at him. He nodded, tearing off to the side while she went the other way, vanishing down into an alley, keeping away from prying eyes. With a burst of speed, she shed her outerwear, slipped into the pieces of her costume she had kept in her bag, hid said bag in a vent, and shot into the sky.

Clark was waiting for her, floating in the air, eyes still trained on the L-Corp building. “I can see... the helicopter’s taking off. Wait, are those drones?”

He whipped forward, clearly not willing to leave it up to chance, and Kara wasn’t far behind him. She spotted them not long after, too, a pair of high-tech, hovering drones, vaguely reminiscent of the design Maxwell Lord had made, but distinct enough that they probably weren’t related. She dove down, then whipped up, throwing herself in front of the drones just as they opened fire, Clark doing the same. The bullets bounced off of her chest, soft taps of pressure.

The drone’s guns revved down, the four rotor blades angling away, stabilizing them from the recoil.

“ _Thought you two might show up, you spoil all the fun_.” A voice came from the drones, slightly distorted by the noise and whatever slipshod microphone had been fitted onto the things. It was an accent from Britain, and while she was pretty certain it wasn’t Irish or Scottish, she didn’t know enough about Welsh or English accents to tell.

“You know,” Clark started, sounding almost annoyed by that statement. “If you were expecting us to show up, you should’ve brought something a little more powerful.”

“ _I did. I brought my wits. I’ve drones planted throughout the city, targeting civilian populations as we speak. It’s your choice, aliens: innocent civilians, or the helicopter?_ ”

One of the two drones began to pull away, angling, trying to get a line on the helicopter.

“Go!” Kara shouted, gesturing at Clark. “I’ve got the chopper!”

Clark nodded, pulling up and away, firing off with an audible blast of force.

Kara didn’t hesitate, heat rolling up into her eyes as she carved through the repositioned drone with her eye beams, sending half-slagged metal toppling towards the ground in a small blast of force. She turned towards the next, eyes still burning, almost stinging with the force of the plasma building up around them, just in time to watch a small rocket flick out from a hidden pocket in the drone, launching forward, right towards the helicopter.

It was going to hurt, but she threw herself in front of it, catching the nose of the missile right in her chest. The force of it threw her away, down, she watched the sky lurch out of vision, plummeting into the concrete, sending shards of it away as she cratered into the roof of the building, skidding. She winced, half out of pain, half to avoid dust getting in her eyes, catching sight of the drone swivelling and unloading a small burst of gunfire into the tail of the helicopter, destroying the propeller and sending it into a spin.

Lena’s scream, only audible to her, was what spurred her back into action.

She rocketed up, through the drone, smashing through it with sheer speed alone. Shards of it fell away, plummeting down to the streets below, and a half-second glance down proved there was nobody there to possibly fall victim to falling debris. Rocketing forward again, she reached out, grasped the landing gear of the helicopter, and used her flight to drag it all the way back down, the top propeller giving out just a few feet before she had guided it to the ground, guttering to a halt, the helicopter dropping the remaining few feet with a loud, sharp _bang_.

She reached out, hauling the door open, checking quickly over the driver and Lena Luthor. The driver was stunned, but otherwise okay, and Lena Luthor hadn’t been injured at all.

Good. Good. “You’re safe now,” she said, at last, trying to make herself sound more like Supergirl than the concerned Kara Danvers she very much was at this point in time.

Lena, distraught, twisted to look at her. Her eyes were wide, fear slick over her face. Her breathing was rapid, and Kara could hear her heartbeat rattling against her chest, too quick to be healthy. “What the hell was that?”

Kara twisted her face into a frown. “Someone’s trying to kill you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First interlude for season 2! Woo. Kara's always a fun perspective.


	34. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy makes a decision.

There came a point in any well-to-do person’s life where they had to make a stand. Had to put their foot down and state, quite clearly, ‘enough was enough’. Addy had seen it plenty of times in Taylor’s memories, where drawn lines were tested and responded to in equal measure. Usually violently, now that she thought about it. It was, matter-of-fact, what she saw as a normal mode of behaviour.

In this instance, it had come to her attention that Lena Luthor had come much too close to death much too frequently over the last several days, and that was going to have to change.

“Which is why I am deciding to participate in the D.E.O.’s protection detail,” Addy finished, just in time to shovel another carrot into her mouth. The crunch was delectable, as always.

Not, of course, that Kara seemed to understand much of her thought process. Across the table to her, a fork held upraised, mid-way to her mouth with a fluffy bit of pancake hanging off the end, slathered with syrup, she had frozen entirely. “Don’t—” Kara tried, paused, shovelled the pancake into her mouth, and in a surprising turn of events, actually paused to finish chewing first. “Don’t you have work? It’s Wednesday.”

Of course she didn’t? “Serling set a precedent,” Addy explained matter-of-factly, for it was true. Much like how one does not question Emil’s judgement when it came to safety measures, one does not question precedents Serling Roquette set. It was, as far as she could tell, a superstitious belief that doing so would result in everything becoming worse, but considering it was working out so far, she wasn’t particularly inclined to ‘rock the boat’, as it was.

“For what, exactly?”

“Having Wednesdays off.”

Kara blinked a few times, visibly poking at one cheek with her tongue. “I’m not entirely sure if I want to know how she managed that,” she admitted, after a few moments.

Nodding wisely, Addy understood that much. It was a sign of great strength to acknowledge one’s own weaknesses, even for this.

“With that in mind,” she continued, reaching to gather up a few more carrots and dunk them judiciously in her little cup of hummus. “I am intending to arrive at the D.E.O. main headquarters, get as much information on who is currently targeting Lena as I meaningfully can, and use my civilian wear to hide amongst the crowd as Lena has her speech.”

Kara’s face wrinkled a bit, a frown tugging at her lips. “I told you I was going to get her not to, right?”

Somehow, somewhen, Kara had gotten it into her head that one may simply tell Lena Luthor not to do something. In a surprisingly childish turn of character, Lena Luthor had, in fact, a measurably higher chance of doing what you didn’t want her to do if you told her as much. The best way, generally, to prevent her from doing something you disagreed with was to make a convincing case, usually to her and a board of directors, by her estimate. One does not _tell_ someone like that to do anything, truthfully.

“While in the crowd, I intend to intervene in the very likely event that Lena is to be attacked,” she carried on, not quite willing to put such scathing criticism of Kara’s optimism into words.

Kara breathed out through her nose, a bit huffily by Addy’s estimate. She raised a hand up, her fork left abandoned across the syrup-slick plate which had once been host to a veritable mountain of pancakes, but now merely left faint hints at the carnage which took place. Slowly, with great care, Kara began applying pressure to the bridge of her nose, rubbing back and forth.

Addy wasn’t... particularly sure why, exactly.

“I’m going to try to get her to not do this again,” Kara said, at least, finally relinquishing the bridge of her nose from what looked to be a rather tight grip.

“I wish you luck in that endeavour,” she replied in turn, because she would certainly need it.

Kara breathed out in a puff, throwing some of her blonde hair away from her eyes. “Thank you, your confidence is noted.”

“I was not giving you any.”

“That was sarcasm, Addy.”

* * *

It was almost paradoxical how people treated her. When she had been at the D.E.O. HQ before, in costume, she got a few cursory glances, certainly. Enough to acknowledge her existence, but little more than that. At the time, she had even been wearing one of her favourite patterns she designed, one which, by her own estimate, was rather eye-catching.

Yet, here she was, walking into the D.E.O., not in her costume, merely in her civilian wear, and not a head didn’t turn to stare at her. Addy wasn’t very fond of being overly observed, admittedly, though thankfully the agents around her didn’t try to stop her once it became clear her biometrics were letting her through the various tiers of security as she ambled deeper and deeper into the interior of the building.

That wasn’t to say the staring stopped. No, it did not. She was stared at by the veritable peanut gallery of ambiguously-shaped, boringly-designed, black-clad agents as she entered, she was stared at when she began walking down the catwalk towards the area below, and she almost certainly was stared at as she paced down the long, singular hallway towards the main operations area.

Being, however, much above their petty curiosity, Addy was mostly content to ignore them as she did most of the less important people in her life.

Dragging her eyes along the myriad of screens, milling agents, and armed guards, her eyes finally found her mark: Alex. Alex was with J’onn, leaning over a computer as they talked in hushed tones. Behind them, a wall of monitors displayed tracking notices, maps, passports and more, none of which had a single unifying name among them, aside from, as far as Addy could tell, mostly originating from Poland.

Letting her pace draw to a halt, Addy cleared her throat.

Alex jolted, but J’onn didn’t. By her estimate, he always had an approximate idea of where she was due to her telepathic presence, and apparently he was inclined to use that to amuse himself. Still, he at least looked much better than he had over the last few days, run ragged trying to fix and account for all the things people did to his well-oiled machine of a black-ops government agency in his absence.

“Addy?” Alex asked, at last, blinking confusedly at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“It’s a Wednesday,” Addy rather simply supplied, and was quietly reminded that Kara and Alex, despite not actually sharing any genetic ancestry, were very much siblings. They both focused on the wrong things too often, in her opinion. “I am here to help.”

Gently rising from her seat, with J’onn shuffling back out of the way, sending an amused smile in Addy’s direction, Alex hit her with what could only be described as a _supremely_ dubious look. “You are,” she said, sounding each word out like she wasn’t entirely sure if they were truthful or not.

“I am,” she reiterated, if only for completion’s sake.

Sharing a look with J’onn, some unvoiced, expression-based form of communication Addy had yet to even remotely grasp, much to her annoyance, Alex finally directed her eyes back to her. “Okay,” she said at last, mien shifting from vaguely bewildered and defensive to something much more fittingly professional. “How much do you know about the target?”

“Not a thing,” Addy supplied, matter-of-factly.

“Not unsurprising,” Alex mumbled, stepping away and out from behind the desk as she circled around. She and J’onn were located on a bit of a raised platform in the center of the operations bay, vaguely similar to the one that had been at the desert base, if significantly less roughshod. She turned to the screens behind her, digging in her pocket for a moment before pulling out a phone that had a passing resemblance to a brick in terms of how durable it looked. A few taps, and the various screens along the wall changed, shuffling back into something more cohesive.

A man’s visage was the first thing Addy picked out, among all of it. His head had a rather narrow shape to it, dirty brown hair shorn short, not even reaching his ears. His face was set in a half-grimace, pale skin stretched over slight cheekbones, a defined chin, and a surprisingly long bridge to his nose. He was wearing a simple t-shirt, white, though the image cut off at around his waist, leaving little else to be observed.

“This is John Corben,” Alex explained, belatedly. “An international hitman, and someone who has been somewhat on our radar, largely due to his association with the Luthors. Speaking of a Luthor, what are you even going to—do? I’m certainly not expecting you to consent to be geared up in tactical gear.”

Addy flicked her eyes away from the half-grimacing man, blinking owlishly at Alex. “I intend to go to the venue in my civilian clothes and hide amongst the crowd. If I am not present as Administrator, it’s more likely that John Corben will attack more haphazardly. Nobody truthfully understands my powers, outside of some of you, and while technically some technology may hinder that, it is best if he doesn’t come prepared for me.”

Alex and J’onn both stared at her.

She felt vaguely insulted, for some reason. “If you’re satisfied?” she led on, instead of the more ‘please stop staring at me, it’s rude’ that she more directly wanted to say at them.

Flushing awkwardly, Alex coughed, turned back to the screens. “Right, that’ll work—actually.” She turned away again, because of course, glancing up towards the catwalk. “Vasquez!” She shouted.

J’onn winced, clearly displeased with the sudden noise right next to him.

“What?!” Susan’s voice belted back, half-muffled. “I’m on break!”

“Get an earpiece!” Alex barked, in the similar sort of tone she’d used on Winn during game night.

There was a pause, a very rebellious sort of silence.

“...Fine,” came the weak submission, the sound of stomping boots fading off into the distance.

“You do know, Agent Danvers, that you have two legs you could’ve used to go up there and ask her, correct?” J’onn chided, sounding unimpressed. “Professionalism is important.”

Addy could agree to that much.

Alex, however, clearly didn’t. She shot him a dubious look, glancing towards a desk, upon which a half-demolished tin of oreos sat, looking as though it had been ripped haphazardly from its packaging in a moment of great mental weakness and powerful hunger.

“That has nothing to do with this,” J’onn said tartly, almost pouting.

Alex glanced away, a near roll of her eyes. “I’m certain,” she muttered, finally turning back to the actual problem at hand: John Corben. They all, for a moment, just stared at the screen, where his ugly, horse-like mug stared back at them.

“John Corben,” Alex began again. “Is an international hitman, and expensive. He’s worked with intergang and was one of the main architects of the Kaznian-funded Corto Maltese genocide, as seen out by Orthodox terrorists. He’s notorious.”

Alex tapped on her phone, the screen shifted again. It was a candid shot of Corben, hunched over, shuffling supplies into a fold-out metal briefcase.

“The people who hire John Corben are the people who want someone dead, but they also want to rub salt in their wounds,” J’onn picked up where Alex had paused, walking forward as well. “Corben has a habit of gloating, not to the point of making a scene or monologuing, but enough that his victims rarely die without warning. You would think that would be sloppy, wouldn’t you?”

Addy blinked, flicking her eyes back towards J’onn and Alex, who were staring expectantly at her. “No,” she said, thinking for a moment. “I would think someone who is this well-known and prolific, by your description, would have to be incredibly skilled to not be dead with a habit like that.”

J’onn nodded. “You would be right, in that case. John Corben was identified by his voice, during his altercation with Lena Luthor, when he sicced drones on her and on the city at large. That is part of the reason why we’re so concerned about him, he is known for not just taking out his targets, but also causing a lot of collateral damage. He’s put entire cities into black-outs before to get to his quarry. The only benefit we have against his normal targets is that our country is much larger and more powerful than the ones he operates in.”

“He targets mostly unstable countries,” Alex explained, for her benefit. “The Corto Maltese genocide was a movement funded primarily through Kaznian terror organizations for the sole purpose of getting rid of the current democratically led leadership. They wanted access to the wealth of copper mines in the region, and by the time they were done, they got them. The country, already in a weakened position after years of corruption, folded not too long after.”

“How does he normally operate?” Addy asked, glancing briefly towards Alex, who was tapping quietly away on her phone again.

The screens shuffled, drawing her focus back. Images of photocopied police reports, witness testimonies, and a litany of other evidence began proliferating itself across the various screens.

“He likes to target his victims personally, as mentioned,” Alex explained. “He’s known for disguises, getting access to uniforms and other tactical equipment through both legal and illegal retailers. He’s known for his proficiency with handguns, as well as long-ranged riflery. He’s a good shot, and a good actor. What’s mostly kept him alive, though, has been his ability to escape. He’s hard to pin down for any length of time without quite literally pinning him in place with something.”

That could be arranged, and not with much difficulty either.

“Any habits we should be looking out for?”

“He prefers first-responders, when it comes to disguises,” J’onn said, at last. “Police officers, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs. Most of them let him either conceal his weapon using their generally heavy outerwear, or wear it openly merely as part of the uniform.”

Footsteps approached from behind, heavy and clunky, the sort that came from boots. Addy swivelled a bit, finding Susan walking up towards them, an earpiece in one hand. She had a bit of mustard at the corner of her mouth, clearly from where she’d been interrupted with her food. “Got you the earpiece,” she said, staring uncharitably at Alex, who merely gestured towards Addy. The stare she got, rather than uncharitable, was nicer, a slight smile tugging at her lips. She stepped forward, extending one hand out—

“You’ve got mustard on your mouth,” Addy informed, gesturing with her hand at her own.

Susan paused, shut her eyes, and breathed in deeply. “I,” she said, with great slowness. “Am going to hurt Winn.”

“I would prefer if you didn’t,” Addy replied, because it was the truth.

“Emotionally,” Susan appended.

“I believe he has enough of that already, Vasquez,” Alex reminded, from off to the side.

Reaching up, Vasquez blotted the mustard away with her palm, scrubbing hard enough to just about peel paint from the walls. To her credit, though, it certainly got rid of the mustard. With her hand she hadn’t nearly just pushed wholesale into her mouth, she extended the earpiece once again.

Addy took it, brought it up to her ear, and looped it around the top.

“ _Hey, Addy,_ ” Winn’s voice greeted, sounding rather exhausted.

“Hello Winn,” she replied in turn, glancing up towards one of the numerous cameras that just-so-happened to be swivelled in her direction. She waved.

“ _Aw, I was hoping you’d ask how I knew you were wearing it_.” Winn’s voice had something to a pout to it, as though he had just missed out on something truly monumental.

Addy didn’t get it, but then she had a habit of not really getting people in general sometimes. “From the fact that you’re not here to greet me, I assumed you had finally gained access to a more official set-up, rather than a random desk in the middle of the operations bay.”

“You would be wrong,” Alex called out. “He’s currently in time-out.”

Addy turned to stare at her. That was certainly a statement. “I thought that was only for children.”

“If it walks like a duck...” Alex said, leadingly.

Addy blinked. Slowly. “It’s a duck?” That or some other waterfowl. Or a penguin, now that she thought about it.

Susan, J’onn, and Alex all stared at her.

“What Agent Danvers was trying to say,” J’onn said at last. “Is that Winn is currently undergoing training for long-term, secretive assignments, where he would be unlikely to be able to leave his base of operations for prolonged periods.”

“ _In this case, it’s a hollow concrete cube the size of a janitor’s closet. I’ve been here for like, two days._ ”

Addy squinted. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“ _I’ll have you know I’ve acclimated to this perfectly_ ,” Winn cut in over her earpiece, sounding unimpressed.

“We’re working on it,” Alex supplied meaningfully, glancing back towards the screens.

Addy glanced that way herself, finding nothing new on them. Another cursory glance around the area helped gauge the time. She had more than enough time to arrive early, she could even stick around for a short amount of time, but that felt - to her, at least - counterproductive. “I’ll be going, then.”

“We’ll have agents on-site, Addy,” J’onn said. “They’ll be connected up to your earpiece, so please, work with them.”

“...Why wouldn’t I?” Addy wasn’t sure where he’d gotten the impression she’d just, what, carelessly throw away resources like that.

“The last operation you went on with us involved you ignoring direct orders and hurling yourself through the floor and into a spaceship with unknown defences,” Alex reminded, sounding a bit bitter.

Ah, right. Alex had been one of the commanding officers on that venture. Still, she should probably reassure her. “I doubt there will be any breakable floors or spaceships at the L-Corp name reveal,” she said, wisely, for if there were, it would certainly be a dramatic change in events.

Alex just made a weird, sigh-like noise.

“Now do you see what it’s like with Supergirl sometimes?” J’onn asked, clearly directing it at Alex.

“I’m starting to get an idea, thank you.”

Probably not a conversation she should be involved in, Addy turned back around. Susan was gone, already climbing back up the stairs, and the way to the exit was not going to be any shorter or longer than it had been when she’d arrived. Or any less awkward, by her estimate.

“ _Anyway, Addy! How’s the new job going?_ ”

Beginning to walk, she gave that question some thought.

“Surprisingly full of explosions and OSHA violations, why?”

* * *

“ _No sign of Corben yet, E-Team. Status?_ ”

People milled around her without much thought, an endless tide of bodies, faces and voices as they waited for Lena to arrive. The area that the event was taking place in was the open pavilion just outside of the company’s building. A stage had been set up, with stairs on either side, giving a few feet of height on anyone in the crowd. A mic had been placed in the dead center of the stage, and near the very back were several screens, all currently inert, but no doubt likely to display information about the new name change.

The sun was high, the air was as hot as you might expect from being in California near the start of June, and there wasn’t even a cloud in the sky. It was a perfect day for a speech, by Addy’s estimate, but as a direct consequence, it was also likely the best day for attempted murder. Clear skies were nice until someone tried to kill you from a rooftop, as Taylor so often said to herself, as nobody else had been able to get where she was coming from.

“ _All clear. We’ve got nothing over here, as well. Agent Danvers?_ ”

Addy let her eyes track towards where the crowd was at its thickest, full of reporters, cameras, only kept back from swarming over their target by the ever-valiant Jess Hoang, who was standing in front of them with an expression of raw distaste. Behind her, Lena was walking alongside Kara, who had a small notebook clutched to her chest and was, by Addy’s rough estimate of lip-reading, trying very hard to convince Lena not to go through with what she was about to go through with.

Not that she could’ve backed out at this point to begin with, it was quite literally minutes from the reveal, but Addy could give Kara credit for her sheer stubbornness. She wasn’t sure how well that would pan out, considering Kara seemed to actually want to be Lena’s friend, but then it wasn’t like she had much experience in matters of platonic love either. Taylor’s experience, in this case, was in fact violently contrary to the understood expectations of the early stages of friendship, always swinging between ‘I-will-kill-and-or-betray-you’ and ‘I-will-kill-and-or-die-for-you’.

With one last sour look shot in Kara’s direction, who finally relented with both palms raised, a sheepish sort of frown on her face, Lena broke off. Jess finally pulled away from the crowd as well, walking quickly to match Lena’s stride, saying a few things to her before coming to a stop just next to the stairs. While Jess remained, Lena climbed, arriving on top of the stage despite her painful-looking heels likely not playing nicely with most conventional forms of stairs. Or slopes. Or... really any ground, now that Addy thought about it.

“I want to thank you all for coming,” Lena began, speaking into the mic. Her voice was pleasant, but firm, professional but not so cynical that it was cold. “My brother hurt a lot of good, innocent people.”

There was a shuffle off to Addy’s right, drawing part of her attention.

“My family owes a debt, not just to Metropolis, but to everyone.”

James emerged from amongst the throng of faceless onlookers, camera held in hand. He blinked blearily at her, brain taking a moment to process her existence. “Oh, hey Addy. Didn’t think you’d be here.”

She could almost certainly say the same for James, really. “I would not normally come to functions such as these,” she agreed, Lena’s voice filtering off into something more like background noise. “Are you here to take photos?”

“Yeah,” James said, hefting his camera up a bit. “Miss Grant, she wants a profile done on Lena Luthor. It’s being fitted into the theme for this month, specifically an article on humans and aliens coming together, despite differences.”

There was something in his voice. Something dubious and vaguely bitter.

There was a _click_ , but no accompanying flash. James glanced down at his camera, grimacing as he brought it back up, clearly not impressed with the photo he took.

“You don’t sound convinced,” Addy said, at last.

“ _All clear in area 4, A-Team._ ”

“ _Roger. Any signs he might be planning something?_ ”

“Well,” James paused, briefly. There was another click, a moment of expertise, and he pulled his camera away from his face. This time, Addy spared a peek, and it was a _good_ photo. It captured Lena mid-speech, mouth open, a calm and confident look on her face. James nodded a bit at it, a bit of a smile tugging at his lips. “Luthors aren’t—they aren’t people who normally turn a new leaf. They’re hard to trust, especially after Lex.”

“ _We’ve been sweeping the ground, A-Team. No sign of anything_.”

Still, she wasn’t really feeling charitable about that. Everything Lena had done until this point had been done with care and a distinct understanding of her place in the world. She understood exactly what she had to lose, and what she had to gain. It’s what made her so interesting, and it’s what had likely made her brother so dangerous. “Lena isn’t—”

The world exploded. Quite literally, in this instance. The L-Corp building shuddered as a plume of smoke and flame ripped across it, and began detonating up from the grass behind the stage. Screams erupted into being around her, loud enough to jar her ears, and she only had the brief chance to watch Jess quite literally rip Lena from the stage and haul her away before it, too, went up in a fireball.

The crowd surged towards them, piling against them. James cursed wildly, caught in the tide, but Addy jolted out, grasping his arm and yanking both him and herself free from the press, stumbling out onto the concrete as the crowd receded like the sea, away from where the explosions were taking place.

Another rocked the area, heavy and hard. The L-Corp building shuddered again, and a huge piece of stone fell away, plummeting.

It was enough to push her into action. She reached out, shoving James away. “Go!”

He stared at her, wounded, a frown twisting his face. “I can—”

“Just—”

Kara swept in, faster than Addy could see, already in her costume. She wrapped her cloak around both of them, back raised up, as a chunk of the building Addy hadn’t accounted for nearly crushed them both and was instead safely blocked by Kara’s spine. It wouldn’t’ve killed her, but it certainly would’ve taken James out, likely permanently.

Rubble clattered down around them, fist-sized stones from what had once been a concrete slab.

“Go!” Kara shouted, and at least this time James listened. He nodded, fishing his camera into his pocket and rushing along with the crowd.

Kara’s eyes turned to her. She nodded, and then flew off, towards where the L-Corp building was now, very literally, beginning to fall apart.

Why did the villains always have to target infrastructure? Specifically the buildings she worked at. That was getting annoying.

Actually, most of this had already eclipsed her capacity for annoyance. She was beyond that now, utterly calm and yet absolutely ready for this day to be done and over with. Reaching out to her power, she dragged it to the surface and let her awareness bloom, casting over the crowd as she adjusted the parameters. She latched onto sensory information as it poured in, not pressing her powers any further than that, if only to reduce the amount of drain it had on her available solar resources.

Hundreds of eyes became her own. Hundreds of viewpoints among the thrashing throng, something she was more than capable of processing down into a complete mental map of every living person in the area. Every fixture, every change, every new thing. She listened with their ears, felt the pushing and shoving, and delineated it down into a list.

Corben’s face, from the sight of six, now eight, eyes, became clear. He was wearing a police uniform, not too far away, eyes focused on Lena, who had at some point been separated from Jess and was looking, hesitantly, around for help.

“ _Eyes on Corben_ ,” Alex said, in turn. She spotted her as well, hand already reaching for her gun, prowling towards Corben. She might make it in time, but that was too much of a close shave for Addy’s liking.

No, if anyone was going to be saving Lena as of this moment, it was probably going to have to be her. “So do I,” she said into her earpiece, beginning to walk towards Corben, leaning slightly on her strength to make the process quicker than it possibly should be. “Intending to take him down, stay back.”

“ _You sure?_ ” Alex mumbled.

She centred her awareness on the surrounding area, peeling off nearly 3/4ths of her eyes. She didn’t need them anymore, only the ones which could provide meaningful visual input on Corben. “Positive.”

She both felt and saw Alex begin to slow, hanging back just enough to make it look inconspicuous.

Addy picked her pace up, speed walking in every sense of the word.

“Oh, thank god—” Lena said, finally sighting Corben. “Please, you have to—”

Corben raised his gun.

Addy took a single stride, shoved her hand into his hair and her body in front of the gun, driving them both towards the ground.

The gun discharged, missing her and hitting the concrete instead.

She tucked her psychic presence into his little skull, wrapped it around his brain, and _clenched_ it at the same time she drove his head into the concrete. A blow like that normally might just stun someone, movies had always been particularly unflattering about the durability of humans. But in this instance, he was out cold before he even hit the concrete, his gun dropping limply out of hand as he went utterly slack.

Addy turned, glancing towards Lena. She was fine, clearly not hurt by a ricocheting bullet or some other malady. Rather, she looked... very intense? She was staring at Addy with big, big eyes. Awed eyes. Eyes that made her almost uncomfortable to be under.

“FBI!” Alex shouted, finally arriving. Addy peeled herself off of Corben, getting a slight nod from Alex as she leaned down to cuff his unconscious body. She adjusted the unconsciousness, sunk it a bit deeper into his brain tissue but gave it an expiration date. He’d be conscious in about three to four hours, depending on how long it took for his brain to handle the damage she’d inflicted by firing off neurons like that.

“You stepped in front of a gun for me.”

Addy jolted, turning back to Lena. She blinked. What. “Yes?”

“You could have died,” Lena said.

Well, not really. Not unless he had Kryptonite, which, if he was hired by the Luthors, was always a possibility. “I am fond of you,” she said, instead. “And would prefer it if you would not suddenly die.”

Alex made a grunt off to the side, straining to haul a limp Corben properly to his feet. Thankfully, just from proximity, she could already see through the eyes of the rest of the on-site teams who were rushing over, so she wouldn’t have to drag him around for too long. Though he might benefit from having his face dragged across concrete for a few miles, now that Addy thought about it. A traumatic brain injury might do his personality wonders.

With a blur of red, blue and gold, both Kara and Clark landed near to them. Both were in costume, and both were faintly dusted by what Addy was fairly certain was concrete dust. Clark even went through the effort to smack his hands together, delivering plumes of chalky white dust into the air.

“We’ve stopped the building from completely collapsing,” Kara explained, smiling very heroically at Lena, whose attention now turned fully onto them. “But you may want to get an architect to look into it. Like, immediately. We had to substitute an important concrete support fixture with a lot of metal.”

Lena just blinked sluggishly at the two of them, visibly processing the whirlwind of activity that had just been unduly inflicted on her. “Would it still be safe to go in there?”

“Surely you don’t expect people to go back to work,” Clark said, not terribly venomously, but unimpressed nevertheless.

Lena merely shot him a look. “Unfortunately, _Superman_ , I happened to have something of great importance of mine in my office and I was asking if it would be safe to go and obtain it.”

Kara and Clark shared a look, then simultaneously glanced back towards the building, squinting at it.

It took a few moments for it to click that they had x-ray vision. Right.

“...Seems safe?” Kara hedged, sounding a bit uncertain.

“Safer than some of the buildings in downtown Metropolis,” Clark mumbled in return, rubbing at some stubble.

“Should be safe, in that case?”

Clark turned to look at Kara, then Lena, then Addy. Finally, he shrugged. “The building isn’t like, slowly cracking or breaking or anything, and the pillar we built seems to be doing just fine. It should be safe.”

“If that’s the case,” Lena began slowly, eyes flicking between the two costumed superheroes. “Addy, can you come with me for a moment?”

Addy turned to look at her, blinked. “I can’t see why not.”

Clark’s mouth opened, Kara pointedly tugged on his cape.

“Superman and I will be heading back to report with the local law enforcement, we may stop by later to get any other details, if that’s okay?” Kara said, at last, glancing at Lena.

Lena blinked, paused, then finally nodded. “Of course.”

With that, and a few more tugs on Clark’s cape, both Kara and Clark flew off into the air, a shower of concrete and drywall dust falling down around them.

“I wonder if they dry clean,” Lena said, a bit dizzily, before glancing back in her direction. “Follow me?”

Addy nodded.

Lena began to walk back towards the building, Addy trailing behind her. For the first stretch of it, transitioning from the concrete of the pavilion to the grass of the open lawn, they walked in total silence. The distant wail of first responders grew increasingly louder, blue and reds flashing across glassy windows in the distance.

They arrived at the front doors to the building, which weren’t a thing anymore. Both the metal frames and the glass that made up the majority of them were scattered across the pavement.

Lena sighed tiredly, reaching up to rub at her nose as she stepped over and into the building itself. There was a smoke detector going off somewhere, if Addy was hearing right, and it had been pretty thoroughly evacuated. There wasn’t even the normal security guard to wave them in.

“God, I hope the elevators work—this isn’t how I wanted this to go,” Lena said, at last, reaching out to tap the button. To the building designer’s credit, the light lit up, and the shifting sound of whirring mechanical bits began to play out, so it was probably fine.

“How you wanted what to go?” Addy asked, instead.

Lena glanced back at her, looking very, very tired. “I have something for you, in my office. It's been a personal project, and why I haven’t been as... active as around the building as I could’ve been the last few weeks. It didn’t need much, but it was important, so I got it done first.”

The elevator doors _dinged_ , pulling open. A puddle of coffee sat in the middle of the elevator, which both herself and Lena avoided stepping in as they entered. Lena swiped her card through the reader with barely a glance, the doors drawing shut as they began to ascend.

“You know,” she said, after another moment. “I think we’re both alike and not, a lot of the time. You are very smart, and your home life is... complicated.”

While that was very true, she was thinking of something that wasn’t. “You could say that.”

“There was a study, once, on children and developmental behaviour. A bunch of kids were given a choice: one marshmallow now, or two later. The study had set out to see if choosing delayed gratification correlated with better prospects in the future.”

There was silence for a moment, Lena tilting her head back until it tapped against the glass wall behind her.

“They had to scrap most of the test and do it over again, because as it would turn out, they weren’t testing for that. They were testing for _whether or not children trusted the adults_ , and for wealth. See, the children who didn’t trust, they took what they could get. They _could_ get one marshmallow now, or they could risk getting none later when they were promised two. Richer children, too, were more likely to take the two marshmallows later, as they were used to having tangible rewards or gifts that came frequently, instead of only at Christmas or their birthdays.”

Lena’s eyes flicked to her, a sharp shade of sea glass green. Addy hesitated for a moment, tapping gently at her side with her hand.

“I don’t trust easy. I will say with confidence that my life growing up was less glamorous than endless wealth may lead one to believe. If I’m not mistaken, that man was likely trying to kill me on my brother’s orders. What happened today? Probably not going to help my confidence in humanity.”

The doors opened, and the two of them stepped out into a surprisingly undamaged interior. Addy trailed after Lena as she walked the length of the abandoned hallway, unlocking the door to her office with a twist of her key, and guiding her in.

Pacing into the office proper, Addy came to a halt next to where the chairs were seated, while Lena herself passed further into it, around the back of her desk, and crouched down. She gently pressed her hand into the wall, and with a bit of a push, slid a small, secret panel open, revealing a numpad. She tapped in a password, twisted a latch, and pulled what Addy was fairly certain was a vault open. Lead-lined, if the warning label on the inside of the door was anything to go by.

Pulling a suitcase out from within, Lena shut the vault, slid the panel back on, and climbed back to her feet with a grunt.

“Come over here, please?”

Addy stepped forward, striding towards the desk. Lena sat the briefcase down, spun it around to face her, pressed her thumbs into the latches, and let the lid pop.

A human arm stared up at her from inside. Or at least, a very realistic imitation of one. It came with what looked to be a round charging dock to attach the end of it to, and it had a sort of clamp-like system near where it would presumably press up against her stump.

“May I?” Lena asked, a bit hesitant.

Starting to get an idea about where this was going, Addy reached over, rolled her stump’s sleeve up to her shoulder, and extended it out for Lena.

Carefully, with great precision, Lena took a mesh-like swab from the inside of the briefcase, applied it to the blunt end of the prosthetic, and brought it up to her stump. She pressed it, moving the clamps so that they encircled her arm, and tightened it. She reached down, pressing a hidden button just behind the elbow of the prosthetic.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then, with startling amounts of suddenness, tactile awareness and feedback began flooding into her body. The arm began to twitch, spasm almost, but Addy recalibrated her nervous system with a twitch, adjusting and playing with the boot-up sequence as she synchronized with it. After a few more seconds of spasming, it stopped.

With great care, Addy lifted her right arm. Opened her hand, then closed it.

“Huh.”

She had not... even remotely expected technology on this level, at all, from humans. This was... borderline tinkertech, by her estimate, that swab had been a neural mesh of some kind. It had formed a non-invasive connection with her actual nervous system without requiring painful, invasive surgery that was unlikely to take on a body such as hers, which would likely reject anything inside of her as a foreign element and quite literally push it out via regeneration.

“It’s alien tech, as far as I can tell,” Lena explained, gently. “From one of the androids, the military was making, salvaged from technology they barely understand. It’s been downgraded a bit so that I could understand what was going on with it, but it’s... well. You tell me, how does it feel?”

How did it feel to have both arms again? Like she suddenly had a lot of options available for her that she never did before. Just the sheer number of new _sleeve_ options she could look into? Countless.

But Lena was looking at her, not expectantly, but nervously. Waiting for approval. She flexed her new arm, totally mechanical, yes, but certainly... workable.

She widened her arms, gave what she was about to do some thought, then went in and hugged Lena.

Lena, not unsurprisingly, froze up. Stiffened like a board. Then, with great care, gently returned the hug.

“I have heard hugs can help after emotionally upsetting situations,” Addy supplied, as it had worked for her in the past. Kara’s hugs were always the best, and now she could do them with _two arms_. But, because Lena was the reason she could do it at all anymore, it was only right she got the first two-armed hug. “Also, thank you.”

Lena clutched her a little harder for a while before, with what seemed like great reluctance, broke away. Lena smiled tiredly at her, reaching up to rub at her face, where bruise-like bags had started to take residence beneath each eye. “Sorry about all of this,” she said at last. “I know this is your day off, I don’t think we’ll be open tomorrow. Your prosthetic has about thirty hours of life to it before you need to charge it again for at least six hours. You can find a more detailed manual in there, but please keep me notified?”

Addy nodded, still flexing her new fingers. They had no give, they were just very cleverly-painted metal, but it was certainly novel to have both arms. Only Taylor had ever had that.

“I need to go and make sure this entire building won’t collapse,” Lena said, after another moment. “Which means I have to go and call whoever Cat Grant hired to fix her building. Not to rush you, but, well. Please go home. I need to fix all of this, but keep in contact? My cell phone number should be in the suitcase too.”

As though only remembering it was there after mentioning it, Lena leaned forward and pressed the suitcase shut, sliding it towards her. Addy took it with her _right_ arm, without any strain whatsoever.

Very neat.

“I’ll see you...” Lena trailed off, eyes glazing over. “Four days? Five? God, why does my family have to be like this? Say hi to Kara for me, and tell her I’m safe.”

“I will.” Well, she would if she wasn’t immediately detained for her arm, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays boys, girls, and those of neither persuasion! I'm back!
> 
> I had a nice rest, read some Prachett, y'know, fun stuff. Expect another chapter on Thursday, in all likelihood, as I already had this one written on Monday to prove to myself that, yes, I could still write this and, no, just because I took a week off didn't suddenly mean I couldn't string more than 3 words together on a page.


	35. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes to a friend's house.

Addy was going to have to have a discussion with whoever designed the D.E.O.’s chairs. They were, in no particular order, overly stiff, yet without any meaningful back support, lacked much in the way of aesthetic appeal, and overall were an unpleasant way to spend the better part of an hour. Had she any better options, she would have certainly left the chair by now, but considering her circumstances, such a thing was unlikely to happen.

Painfully bright fluorescent lights beamed down from on high, illuminating the entire area equally, if with a certain sterility to it that made every glaring visual failure that defined the D.E.O.’s design sense that much worse. The walls were all barren steel, the floor was either concrete, metal, or an uncomfortable combination of the two, and the ceilings were merely there to host the aforementioned lights. There was, after all, a reason why Addy did not make it a habit to have regular trips to the D.E.O.’s myriad of headquarters: they were an eyesore.

And she had been sitting in one for an hour. Or more precisely, seventy-four minutes and twenty-three seconds. Twenty four, now.

“My god, she’s a genius,” Winn continued babbling, drawing Addy’s eyes. He was tapping away on a keyboard next to where they had placed her new prosthetic after rather rudely confiscating it. Currently, the prosthetic arm was suspended in the air above a large, hi-tech panel, around which holographic diagrams flickered to-and-fro, diagnostic scans among some of the few tests they were running on it. Or, rather, that _Winn_ was running on it, as he was the only person who had even the remote chance of understanding it outside of possibly Addy herself, and if you’d forgotten, she was currently restricted to the world’s most unpleasant piece of furniture.

She was relatively sure this wasn’t a form of psychological torture - that being boredom combined with an unappealing environment and uncomfortable seating arrangements - but she was fairly certain it could be used as one, given the right impetus.

Kara, Clark, Alex and J’onn were all arrayed around the arm as well. Kara was standing next to Clark, having an ongoing muttered conversation that Addy had learned to tune out nearly forty minutes ago, whereas Alex was overseeing Winn now that they had given him the privilege of not being stuck in a concrete box. J’onn, meanwhile, stood behind all of them, a thoughtful look on his face as his eyes drifted between the prosthetic, herself, and back again.

In Addy’s opinion, while she had little luck in deciphering the context of their faces, she was fairly certain some among that crowd were a little _too_ amused about all of this. Especially Kara, whose lips kept twitching abruptly whenever Winn would find some new part of the technology to begin rambling about.

Truth be told, she was not at all pleased with it. While the first initial rounds of tests and demands after arriving back from her visit from Lena were, in the grand scheme of government paranoia, understandable, that benchmark for acceptable conduct had long since elapsed. She had expected thirty minutes of some haggling and jockeying and some choice words about her decision to let something which could affect her nerves be attached to her body—as if she would ever lose against a piece of admittedly sophisticated but ultimately very _human_ piece of tech—and while that exact scenario had played out, much more had as well.

She wanted to fiddle around with her new arm, try out the settings, feel out the small kinks and inconsistencies in the design. She liked having two arms, especially with the contrast of being reduced down to only one being absolutely apparent.

“Hey, Addy?” Winn asked, glancing up from his monitors. Addy wasn’t very fond of the half-crazed look on his face and the growing sign of mania that had started to wrinkle around his eyes, but then she was fairly certain Winn was just like... _that_ sometimes. “Are you certain these are coming onto the market?” His voice had a breathy tone to it, filled with more excitement than sense.

This was, for the record, not the first time he had asked. Or the second. Or the third. It had been the fifth. That was approximately once every 14 or so minutes.

Still, Addy was obligated to reply, as his job - insofar as he was currently doing anything but mindlessly gushing over technology that was _hers_ \- wouldn’t continue without her affirmation. “I am fairly certain I have been given a prototype for a piece of technology that will be released later, yes.” Or, at least that was her hypothesis.

“My _god_ ,” Winn mumbled, fingers picking up speed again on his keyboard as more meaningless information streaked across the air. The holographic technology had been salvaged from aliens, Addy was fairly certain, as she could occasionally see a flash of an alphabet she didn’t know appear in the top right corner of the projected space. “If that’s the case, I might chop off my own arm, this is—”

“Alright,” J’onn interrupted, and Addy felt something like relief tangibly fill her chest. Finally, an authority stepping in. “Enough of that, Agent Schott.”

Winn jolted, spinning around in his little chair to smile awkwardly at J’onn, as though he had merely been trying to steal one of J’onn’s favourite sweets, rather than admit to self-mutilation to gain a prosthetic limb.

“Are there any bugs or malicious tech in it?”

Winn glanced back over his shoulder, to where all the diagrams had paused without his instruction. “I confirmed there wasn’t any over half an hour ago,” he admitted glibly.

Addy felt herself twitch. Involuntary bodily movement wasn’t new to her, but the fact that the twitch resulted in part of the chair’s back creaking audibly as plastic gave beneath her strength did indicate this was one of the worst ones to date.

Kara choked, and Addy swung her head around to watch her visibly try to bite down on what she was fairly sure was _laughter_.

Addy would show _her_ funny. This had been an excruciating hour, she would have them all know. She had limits, however much larger they may be than all of her peers. There was no amusement in being stuck in a sterile box while your friend takes advantage of your robotic limb to gush over technology he barely understands.

“Then, please,” J’onn said, voice thick with exasperation. “Give Adeline her arm back.”

Weirdly, she didn’t mind J’onn calling her Adeline. It almost felt nice, when he said it.

Winn pouted, but when J’onn didn’t crumple beneath it, he sighed. “C’mon and get it,” he said, spinning back around in his chair to swipe his fingers across a few keys, the holograms flickering off and the arm slowly descending from where it had been lifted into the air.

Addy climbed from her seat, glancing back at it. There was a large crack down the center of the back where her spine had acted as a blunt instrument, but that was the cost of wasting her time. Trudging forward, she arrived at the display area, took both the arm and the neural swab off of the surface, applied one to the other, and then stuck the arm back onto her stump, before clamping it down in place. Thankfully, whoever had made it had common sense and managed to make every part of the process something you could do with one hand, which meant it wasn’t long until the nerve start-up began, and she was forced to subtly adjust again for new variables until her arm was operational.

Flexing her fingers a few times and rolling her elbow, she nodded. Good.

Footsteps approached from her right, and Addy swivelled to look. J’onn was staring at the arm, though his eyes drifted up to be about where her face was, if without trying for eye contact. “So?”

Addy glanced back at her arm, then back at J’onn. “Well made,” she said, at last. It felt a bit like an admittance, but it was the truth.

Something softened on J’onn’s face, made the wrinkles less severe. His mouth twitched into something you could very comfortably call a smile. “You deserve it,” he rumbled, but not a _bad_ rumble. A good rumble, the noise coming from deep in his chest like a purr.

“Are you certain I shouldn’t run any checks on it at the Fortress?” Clark’s voice interrupted.

Addy turned her head, and so did everyone else apparently. Kara, Alex, Winn, even J’onn were all staring at Clark, who had come to a stop a few short paces away. His own eyes were centred entirely on J’onn, a staring contest in the making occurring between the two of them. Clark’s arms twitched at his sides, as though he had to physically restrain himself from raising them up and crossing them over his chest defensively.

“I will _not_ ,” Addy began, with great emphasis. “Be reduced down to one limb for however many hours you need to spend with it in an environment it is unlikely to be suited for.”

“That, and the D.E.O. is, Superman, capable of ascertaining safety,” J’onn cut in.

Addy glanced between the two of them, a frown tugging at her lips. They were going to do that standoff thing again, weren’t they? Two important people squabbling was never a good thing.

Before she could open her mouth, though, a shoulder bumped into hers, very gently. Kara, smiling off to her side, motioned with her head towards where Alex was, and in general where the exit to the D.E.O. building is.

“C’mon,” Kara said, her smile not twitching even as an argument between J’onn and Clark began to grow in volume in the background. “Let them squabble. Show me your arm?”

It was true enough that Addy wasn’t particularly interested in listening to them fight, so without anything better to do, she nodded. Kara followed close to her left as the argument grew more distant behind them, and not long after Alex took up her right, stepping in without missing a beat.

“Any numbness?” Alex asked, hesitating for a moment, her hand almost outstretched towards her new one.

Rather simply, she extended it out for Alex to look over, who gently took her prosthetic, rolling her sleeve up until she could look at where it was clamped down against her skin.

“Not near the stump, no,” Addy explained as they walked.

“Headaches? Nausea?”

“No.”

“I’m surprised,” Alex said, after a moment. “Prosthetics like this are much more common among aliens, I’ve had to do check-ups for people with both invasive and non-invasive attachments. Tell me if anything starts feeling weird though, okay? Playing with your nervous system is always dangerous.”

That was a bit of a stupid statement. Of course it was, and of course Addy knew that. Who did they think she was? The broadcast shard? Neurological systems and pairing them together had been her _job_ for most of her existence. Still, Alex was unwavering, and so she nodded in agreement anyway.

“It’s really realistic,” Kara added, leaning a bit past her front - as she certainly couldn’t look over her shoulder, given how much taller she was to Kara - to get a better look. “I can tell it’s not, like, _real_ , but at a glance? It’d be hard to tell it apart from your skin.”

That was the truth, too. Whoever had painted it had done an impressive job at roughly imitating the features all arms had. Slight flecks of hair, the occasional brownish freckle, the way the knuckles pulled against an outer stretchy film to give the illusion that it wasn’t all balls and joints. Outside of actually touching it, it would be hard to tell it apart from any other part of her with merely a glance.

Still, there was certainly more to it than just being realistic. “I may invest in heterogeneous sleeves,” she said, at last. “And accessories, now that I have another place to attach them to.” That and the gloves. There’d been a pair of goose-patterned gloves she’d gotten during their first outing to get her clothes. Not that she had had really any chance to meaningfully wear them - they lived in California, after all - but still, she could now at least do it with both hands when the time inevitably came.

“Ooh,” Kara hummed. “How do you feel about watches?”

Considering the normal habits of humans? “Proud.”

Alex and Kara stared at her, but Kara seemed to get where she was coming from, if the way she was nodding along was any indication.

* * *

Addy arrived home without either Kara or Alex. The former had been dragged off at around the time they were intending to leave, to go off and do superhero things with Clark, who had stormed away from his argument with J’onn in a huff. Alex, meanwhile, as the most responsible out of them, had a long-term job she couldn’t entirely deviate from, and therefore couldn’t leave the premises until much later.

She didn’t particularly mind, though. While she wasn’t entirely fond of being alone all the time, some time to herself was a good thing in this instance.

Locking the door behind her, Addy toed her shoes off on the mat where all footwear went and shucked her outerwear with it, tossing it over the coat rack while still making sure she carried her suitcase with her. The apartment was quiet, a little uncomfortably so, by Addy’s own estimate. The television was off, and they’d been out for most of the day, meaning any lingering scents from breakfast were long faded without anything to replace them. Maybe out of everything, Addy liked silence the least. She hated too much noise, but there was a very broad middle ground between ‘absolute silence’ and ‘overwhelmingly loud’ that encompassed most of her daily life. She was even tempted to turn the television on as she passed towards her room, if only to have the ambient noise, but discarded the idea.

Her bedroom hadn’t changed much since Kara had helped partition it off. It was still encompassed by those fold-out walls, it still had one bed, one desk, and a dresser. It still had the same fairy lights strung up and around. But now it had more of the things she’d gathered, over time. Her laptop was tucked away on the desk, its bag slung over the back of the chair tucked in beneath it. Saturday the Goose sat plush and pleasant on her bedspread, and there were a variety of pages strewn around the area, little bits of information she’d catalogued from her time working under Winn and Emil both, as well as her own projects, however incomplete they may be.

After first depositing the prosthetic’s case at the foot of her bed, she went on to pick her laptop up and head towards it, gently depositing it down on her bedside table before, with great care, ambling onto the mattress itself. The fabric depressed where she crawled forward, up to where Saturday the Goose was. Briefly, after a moment to arrange her limbs in the proper configuration, Addy wrapped Saturday up in a hug, this time with both arms, and buried her face into the goose’s neck.

The slight pressure of the fabric against her face, the way she could anchor herself with both arms instead of needing to compensate for her stump. Yes, this certainly proved it, two-armed hugs were, in fact, better. Especially when it came to hugging a huge stuffed goose. She would keep a note of it.

She let herself just lay there for a time, decadent with sensory information as each small clump of fur on her stuffed animal’s body pressed against her skin. She wiggled a bit, twisted her legs back-and-forth, slowly letting the stress from today - assassination attempt, a new arm, and so on - dribble out of her.

Only when the silence overcame the pleasure she got from laying there did she finally, with great reluctance, peel herself free of Saturday and turn back to her laptop. Rolling about, she eased herself back up into a bit of a sit, letting her back lean against her goose as she hauled her laptop from her bedside table and into her lap. With a pull, she eased the lid open, and used both hands - and it was surprising how novel it had become, she had many more hands than just two in her network form, it shouldn’t be this startling - to type in her password.

A group chat notification stared back at her immediately as her computer dragged itself from sleep mode. Tabbing over to it, she brought the window up.

—QueenAddy [QA] has joined <L-Corp Research Team 4 Chat>—

  
SYS: [Notice]: Current chat admins: RoquetteSerling [RS]. Company rules still apply. You can find a list of commands by typing %help.  
SYS: [Notice-RS]: currently accounted for: myself (important), emil, june | not accounted for: addy, that one janitor I really like, has anyone seen craig?  
SYS: [Notice-RS]: check your emails, lena sent out a notice on when we’ll be allowed back  
  


—End of System Notices—

  
HE: Oh thank God.  
RJ: Addy, you okay?  
QA: I’m unsure why I wouldn’t be.  
RS: Because we saw you as part of the crowd on the news when the bombs went off?  
QA: Oh. Well. I am fine.  
QA: Hello.  
RoquetteSerling [RS] has changed a system notice: currently accounted for: everyone on the lab team | not accounted for: craig   
HE: Really, Serling.  
RS: I was given admin permissions for this group chat, Emil. You’re not the boss here.  
RJ: She has a point.  
HE: Not helping, June. Why did Lena give you the admin position after she left, anyway?  
RS: Because I’m better than you. And cooler. And smarter. And if you say I’m not, I can just mute you.  
RS: Anyway. So, the L-Corp building is definitely remaining shut down for the next few days. ETA from the email is 5-7, 2 weeks at maximum before they start using pop-ups.  
RS: With that in mind, now that the last of our circle of heathens is here, I wanted to offer an alternative to all those interested:  
RS: My place.  
---  
  
Addy blinked at the screen, feeling a bit like she’d just been overtaken by a wave. That had been a surprising amount of worry about her. Not to mention she was almost certain Lena had given the admin position to Serling mostly to screw with Emil, as she certainly couldn’t ascertain any other reason to do it.

HE: Do you even have a place that’s set up well enough? We’ve only been here for a short time.  
RS: I have contacts, Emil. And a house that is so much better than everyone else’s. You’ve been here, June, you tell him.  
RJ: She’s not lying. Her place is really well set-up for working on projects like the black box field generator.  
RS: See? So, you in?  
HE: If only because I’m worried about what you’ll do if I’m not there.  
RJ: It beats doing nothing at home.  
RS: Addy?  
QA: If nothing comes up, I will also come.  
---  
  
It wasn’t a hard decision to make, really. Serling might be eccentric, but then that was often the case with humans. It would not terribly surprise her if Serling had somehow managed to find a perfect place to build things away from prying eyes. That felt very much like a thing she would do.

RS: Schedule wise, everyone free tomorrow? You can just come to my place when you’d normally go in for work, and we can go from there.  
RJ: I’m free, and that sounds fine.  
HE: I’m also free, but you’ve yet to actually tell any of us where you live, Serling.  
RS: Oh right.  
HE: That and someone has to tell Lena since we’re not doing this for free.  
---  
  
Reaching off to the side, Addy grabbed a loose scrap of paper with one hand while the other fished a pen out from next to her laptop, working in tandem to scribble the address and time down. She’d have to tell Kara she was still going to work, and explain where that was going to take place, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

Watching the screen in front of her as Serling and Emil bickered over who had the reluctant privilege of informing Lena they were going to need to still be paid for working from home, Addy felt her attention drift. Her eyes slid from her computer, down her bedspread, off to where she could see the handle of the suitcase just barely sticking up above the foot.

She should probably be checking her own projects, simulations, things she did on the side to help the lab team’s workflow. She should really be.

But she was more interested in that, right now.

Easing her laptop first back onto her bedside table, Addy peeled away and down to the other end of her bed, grabbing hold of the suitcase handle and easing the entire thing up. She dragged it down along with her, letting her body flop back into Saturday’s torso as she let herself get comfortable, her fingers playing over the latches on the suitcase. The exterior was a plain, steely sort of metal, but she’d seen the dark, plush interior before, even if she hadn’t spent much time observing it.

Pressing her fingers down, the latches clicked open, and she eased the lid up.

The depression where her arm would go caught her attention first, oddly. The black material had been pressed down, leaving a mould, and she found herself gently pressing her hand into the valleys at just the right angle, watching the way they perfectly fit against her prosthetic. It felt a bit like how she’d pressed her hand into the glove, from before, if less tangibly emotional.

Breathing in, then out, Addy directed her gaze towards the top lid. Where the bottom was mostly a series of depressions with objects stuck in them, the top lid contrasted it with a mesh-like net and stretchy ribbons which contained a frankly unreasonable amount of extra material in it. Notes, booklets, even the card Lena had mentioned, with her personal phone number scribbled across it.

Her eyes flicked back down to the bottom, where the charging dock, a small toolkit for what looked like basic maintenance, more swabs, an unmarked USB, and the instruction manual were all fitted into their own depressions. The material inside was soft to the touch, like freshly-made carpet, but not so nice that she felt terribly inclined to linger on it.

The extra material was probably the most interesting out of everything, here. She started with that, as a result, dragging the packets out one by one and piling them up next to her knee. She noticed immediately a lot of the material was hand-written, with notes scribbled into margins where it wasn’t. It took a few seconds, but it became relatively obvious it was Lena’s handwriting to boot, especially when contrasted against the card she’d written on.

Among the packets of information were ‘general notes’, ‘configuration details’, ‘OS (USB)’, ‘prototype details’ and a handful of others. She flicked ‘general notes’ open first, pouring over the details handwritten inside. Most of it was shorthand, but it was shorthand Lena had taught her before. It was a generalized overview of the current state of the project, as well as current design failures, details, and difficulties. It covered _everything_ , even down to what the core of the technology was, and how manufacturing and the proceeding roll-out were intended to be handled.

It occurred to her, just near the end of the first notebook, that this was a show of trust. Lena trusted her with this information, as even if it _was_ patented, which she wasn’t entirely sure it was yet, there was enough here to reverse engineer most of the arm.

She shucked that packet to the side, dragging open ‘configuration details’ next.

What she was met with was math, which thankfully she was much better at than generalized engineering. Most of it, at a glance, seemed viable, without any glaring inconsistencies within it, though she had some worries about the deeper dynamics of the mechanics behind the neural layouts, as some of the math did seem dodgy there.

Not that she was thinking about most of it when, by the end of ‘configuration details’, a section on the presumed time it would take to gain full use of the limb popped up. The expected time to reach moderate levels of fidelity in use were around four to eight months.

She had taken about four to eight seconds.

Addy glanced up at the ceiling for a moment, processing. She had the sudden and acute awareness that Lena was probably going to have some questions about that, none of which she could meaningfully answer without J’onn getting upset with her. She could pretend she was just an outlier, something about her brain being different, but that felt like an easy way to leave everyone with _more_ questions.

She’d figure it out later. After a long discussion with Kara, since she seemed fairly good at maintaining a secret identity.

Passing the ‘configuration details’ off to the side, Addy fished the actual manual out from its depression. This one, by contrast, was clearly printed out by a computer, and even came with a hardcover. Popping it open, though, revealed that while it was all very nicely designed and printed, it was still full of Lena’s handwritten notes clarifying and giving context to things, in just the same way she did whenever Addy had a question about something.

Battery time was, as stated, up to 30 hours, though the notes in there stressed that degradation over time was a very real possibility, as the required battery power was high. L-Corp was however working on it, supposedly. Basic maintenance, as with the toolkit, involved getting any loose debris out of joints or important moving parts, as well as semi-regular oiling and ensuring the parts had certain amounts of lubrication to avoid anything overcompensating too much or grinding itself down.

The swabs - known as ‘neuramesh’ - were another point of interest. There were a _lot_ of notes by Lena in this portion, even if most of it was going over the very simple process of applying them, when to replace them, and how to recycle them. Apparently, going by the notes, the actual arm itself was something Lena had confidence she could’ve created on her own, given enough time. The neural swabs, however? Those were the true ‘alien’ part of the tech; she had next to no idea how they entirely worked, other than that they did, and that they were a form of 3D printed neural tissue imitating some lifeform from a planet. They were biosynthetic, even if they both resembled and felt a whole lot like a bathtub sponge. The way the neural tissue worked was by acting as an intermediary between the complicated mechanics of the arm and the person’s own nervous system.

Before she really knew it, she had arrived at the very back of the manual. A blank page had been left in, or at least what had once _been_ a blank page, as currently it had been written over by a note from Lena to her.

_Hello Addy, I hope you’re reading this. I know that this can seem excessive as a gift from someone you’ve only engaged with periodically, and I do apologize if this did seem as though I was overstepping boundaries, but there is a good explanation for why I’m giving you this prototype well before the time we’d be rolling the product out._

_I’ve been working with the team on this prosthetic to get a working prototype as soon as possible, largely due to agreements but otherwise because I had the intention of giving you the first. You may ask why, and that’s because this isn’t a gift, not as we may frame it. This is encouragement._

_I’m giving you this arm because I want to nurture the talent and abilities you’ve shown. I’ve been in close correspondence with Emil over your progress, and your team otherwise has nothing but praise to give to you. Every advantage you can get is critical in situations such as these, and while I may not necessarily think you need this, I feel like you deserve it above all else._

_I can’t normally help you in your endeavours, as my place as the C.E.O. limits how much I can interact with my employees without showing blatant bias. Nevertheless, with this, I can help support you even without being there and help you arrive at places that not even I have._

_I hope this does exactly that._

_Warm regards,_

_Lena Luthor._

_(PS: Keep me updated on the prosthetic, frequently if possible; it_ **_is_ ** _still a prototype.)_

Addy leaned back for a moment, further into Saturday, staring at the note. There was something warm percolating in her chest, a flush of some emotion she didn’t have a good name for or grasp on. She felt _warm_ , like she always did whenever Kara praised her. A smile twitched at her lips, involuntary as it might be, and she let it come.

Someone saw value in her, someone saw her doing good, and capitalized on it. She was proud, both at herself and at Lena.

Though, this did bring up the next thing she was probably going to have to tackle: actually telling people. It was all well and good that her workflow was going to improve with her new arm, but people would - justifiably - have plenty of questions about her sudden acquisition thereof. She didn’t want to give them the wrong impression or anything, after all.

Collecting all but the user manual, she started thinking as she packed everything back away inside the suitcase while snatching the charging dock out from within. Left with just those two extras, she shut the suitcase, eased it off of her bed, and slid it beneath her bedside table while rearranging her bedside table so that her dock could sit up against the wall, with enough space to reach the outlet when she’d inevitably have to get up and charge it.

The best way to handle anything like this, in her opinion, is bluntness. Complete and total openness, inasmuch as she can.

Grabbing her phone from the table, she tapped over to the camera function, angled it at her new prosthetic, and took a picture. After opening up the group chat, she attached it to a message - “Lena made me an arm.” - and sent it.

Predictably, the group chat exploded in a shower of pings and questions. For a while, Serling demanded getting her hands on it, and Addy had built herself up to have to shut her down, only for Emil to do it for her. He browbeat her, for around two minutes, until Serling didn’t even so much as make a request to study it, all without getting banned. She wasn’t sure who she should be impressed with more, honestly.

June was also happy for her, which was a nice bonus.

Still, with the threat of having her arm confiscated for study removed once again, Addy felt her attention draw further away from the group chat, back towards the apartment. It was still quiet, very quiet. She, in hindsight, almost certainly should’ve turned the television on for a low amount of noise, if only to have something breaking it up.

She had plans tomorrow, at least, but the quiet still bothered her. So did being alone, really. Kara was still out with Clark, and she’d been out with Clark a _lot_ , lately. Addy didn’t blame her, couldn’t, she knew that Clark to Kara was as important as Kara was to herself, she understood that. She cherished Clark a lot, and didn’t get to see him with any amount of frequency. They might live in the same country, but you could say the same about two people living in Russia, even if one of them lived closer to America than Moscow.

They might be able to fly back and forth, but with Kara only having become Supergirl recently, Clark just flying over to National City in the past would’ve raised undue suspicion on what exactly Superman was so interested in. It would’ve brought attention to both of them, and that was bad. Even now, their duties prevented them from having much time to just be around one-another. Generally, the only time two of the strongest people on the planet _did_ get to be together was when there was an ongoing crisis or a holiday.

Even so, she did wish Kara was around more often. She didn’t... like being alone, as mentioned. It reminded her of being a shard, in the abstract, during the years she’d spent acclimating to Taylor’s body after being ripped from the network. She also wanted Kara to have breakfast with her more often, even if Kara’s food choices left something to be desired.

She couldn’t let herself feel too mopey, though. She had a job to do.

* * *

“Was this really necessary?”

The car they were in was stuffy, as expected for being stuck in a black car during one a California heatwave. Alex was at the wheel, as she had been the one to rent the car out from the D.E.O., while Kara was in shotgun, staring at the house they had just come to a stop next to.

It might still be early morning, but thermal heating in a part of North America rapidly falling prey to desertification waited for nobody, apparently.

“We wanted to see you off,” Alex explained, though didn’t move her stare away from the house.

Addy appreciated it as much as she didn’t believe that it was Alex’s entire explanation. The decision to drive her here - rather than, say, let her walk - was one she was relatively sure came out of Alex and Kara wanting to know _where_ they were dropping her off. That being Serling’s place, of course, not that the fact that it was helped matters any; apparently, Alex had uncovered some documents on the woman and had become incredibly protective about the entire thing.

Admittedly, Addy still wasn’t sure they were at the right address. Serling’s house - if it was hers, anyway - was an utterly bland-looking carbon copy of every other house in the suburbs it was so miserably located in. The lawn was carefully trimmed and green, it had a single tree next to the driveway, had two floors and looked like every other house designed in the early 80s did.

If nothing else, it might be because Serling recently moved. That and the other supporting factor was that there were three cars in the driveway, which was odd for a house that would, at most, accommodate a family of 3 or 4. There was an old-fashioned muscle car with leather seats that looked to have been cherished and closely maintained, alongside an economic minivan with the back seats torn out and painted a slightly painful acid-green, as well as a bland-as-can-be honda civic painted midnight black with semi-tinted windows.

Addy was fairly certain had she touched the surface of that last one and wasn’t superhuman, it probably would’ve left her with some burns, especially considering how the air around it was slightly wavering. She wasn’t sure whose bright idea it was to make black paint a common fixture in a desert, but whoever had had clearly learned nothing from the fact that most people who lived in deserts tended to avoid the colour if at all possible.

“Is that even legal?” Kara muttered, having apparently followed her gaze and was now staring, grumpily, at the black car.

“With a permit,” Alex explained, with great reluctance, as though she had already checked and was now disappointed that she couldn’t use the law to interrogate and frighten people.

Clicking her seatbelt off, Addy eased the back door open, ignoring Kara requesting that she ‘wait’ so they could spend another five minutes staring at a building that, until she actually went and checked, still had a 30/70 chance of actually being Serling’s place. She’d expected something incredibly blatant, like her buying out a stone tower or something to live out of. That or a gas station. That always seemed more up Serling’s alley.

Tugging her laptop bag over her head, she eased the door shut and, ignoring the immense heat of the outside world, climbed the driveway up the door.

Before she could, though, Kara’s window rolled down.

“Addy! We’ll be here to pick you up, okay? We’ll have dinner!”

Turning around, she felt a strong flutter in her chest again. Happiness, that was the word she was looking for. “Okay,” she replied, rather than shouting, as it was probably rude to do so. Kara smiled at her, head still leaning out the side of the window like a dog’s.

Arriving at the door after a few more strides, she knocked.

To her slight surprise, Serling was the one to actually answer. She was wearing sweatpants and a graphic t-shirt with a band name and an image of someone getting his skull caved in with a sledgehammer. Her hair had been pulled back into a painfully tight ponytail, and she was giving the car Addy had arrived in a shifty, blatantly suspicious look.

“Hey Addy,” she said, at last, glancing away from the car. She stepped to the side to let her in, which Addy took, stepping in through the entrance as Serling shut and locked the door behind her. “Don’t take your shoes off.”

Addy glanced back at her, a frown pulling at her lips. “But it’s rude?”

“My house,” Serling offered blandly, peeking out through the peephole before turning back around to the house’s entryway, walking towards the door at the other end of it. “My rules. C’mon.”

Following after her, Addy kept pace, glancing around. The interior of the house, once again unexpectedly, was nothing like what she expected. The entryway led into an open living room, all of which bore more of a resemblance to an IKEA showroom than it did somewhere somebody might live. There was even a slight layer of dust on the coffee table. In combination with that, there wasn’t a single picture on the wall that you likely couldn’t buy from a retailer, meaning no family photos.

It looked barren and impersonal, not somewhere somebody like Serling might live.

“Where is everyone?” Addy asked, instead, allowing herself to be led from the living room and into a long, narrow hallway.

“Downstairs,” Serling supplied, long strides of her leg guiding them out of the far exit of the hallway, into what was clearly the stairs leading down into the basement. They descended them together, step-by-step, with the natural light that had filtered in through the windows being replaced with harsh fluorescent bulbs set into clearly unfinished sockets up above.

“You friends with feds, Addy?” Serling asked, sounding genuinely curious even though the words there sounded more like a threat. “‘Cos that was a real fed-y car.”

She wasn’t really sure how to phrase it, but. “My adoptive sister”—which was both the best word for it and the best idea overall, she liked Alex being connected to her like that, it made her feel warm—“is part of the federal government, yes.”

Serling just nodded, scratching at her cheek as they finally arrived in a completely abandoned, but open basement. Down here were more clear signs of Serling actually living somewhere, including a workbench, a few discarded tools, and a t-shirt that had, evidently, been set on fire, if the massive black scorch mark in its center was any indication.

Still, there was nobody to be found here.

Serling, without missing a beat, passed by the workbench, the tools, and the burned clothes, crouching down to tug a small tarp off of the ground, revealing that it had been concealing a currently closed hatch.

“I didn’t buy this place for the location,” Serling offered, screwing her eyes shut as she hauled the apparently rather heavy hatch open. The sound of voices, down below, filtered up, and Addy drew closer, glancing down the opening to find a ladder leading into a metal hallway. “Damn right I didn’t, I’m, in fact, _putting up_ with its godawful location and absolute shit HoA who bitch and whine about my lawn because guess what?”

Addy blinked, glanced at her.

“Some paranoid motherfucker built a nuclear bunker here, is what,” Serling clarified, and with little prompting, began descending the ladder.

Only when she reached the bottom did Addy follow after, easing herself down the ladder with much better logistics now that she didn’t have to substitute a handhold for a stump.

It became abundantly clear that this, if nothing else, was where Serling lived when Addy’s foot hit a series of strewn-about t-shirts left lying haphazardly on the ground. Turning around, Serling already stalking ahead, Addy could peek, at the other end of the metal tunnel, a round, open area, with a small arena in its center.

Trailing after her, Addy got her first good look at the space as she passed out through the opening.

True to her first glimpse, it was a round, circular area with a lot of open space. The floors were concrete, the walls metal and concrete, and the ceiling, unsurprisingly, yet more concrete. Some of the walls had doors in them, among which was one with a ‘DON’T ENTER’ sign left above it. In the dead center of the room was a small arena, where the corpse of what had once probably been a battle bot was now left thoroughly slagged, looking almost as though it had been fused with the ground.

The space was otherwise taken up by workbenches and parts, strewn about in small clusters with tables and chairs. At one end, June was looking at a tablet in her hands, a half-built robot in front of her, while at the other Emil had acquired a chair and was sitting in front of a television. The walls were plastered with posters, rock bands ranging from ‘Scenes of Science and Intrigue’ to ‘Deathmurder’, as well as several DEFCON posters and posters of robot fight clubs, among which were a few that labelled Serling as the winner of the tournaments.

Yes, she was fairly certain this was absolutely where Serling spent most of her time, now that she was looking closer.

June glanced up as Serling grew near to her, smiling a bit and waving with her fingers as she caught sight of Addy. Addy, in turn, waved back, though June’s attention quickly defaulted to Serling as the two of them began to chat. Left with nobody else, Addy found herself wandering over to Emil’s side, catching sight of the television. On it, John Corben’s face was up in the top-left corner, a criminal analyst hired by the local newscaster explaining what exactly it meant that they’d captured him.

Emil, for some reason, didn’t look happy. His expression was tight, closed off, and his hands were tense against his sides.

“What’s wrong?” The words came before she could really take into account what their impact might be. Emil twitched, paused, then glanced her way.

“It was too easy,” he said, at last, turning back to the television. “I’ve worked with the Luthors for most of my career, I know how they act—if what they’re saying about this possibly being tied to Lex is true, then this was much, much too easy. You don’t hire John Corben if you’re taking out a hit to make a message, and are okay with failure. You call John Corben to have someone dead, and soon, with a lot of trauma involved.”

Oh. Addy blinked, let her mind refocus. That was... true, in a sense. A hitman could operate as either a warning or an actual assassination attempt, usually both. If someone was hiring a hitman known for killing his targets, rather than someone more easily disposable but by extension less likely to succeed, it probably wasn’t just going to end there.

“Something about how quiet it’s gotten after this is bothering me,” Emil continued, rubbing at his face. In the background, Addy heard Serling say something about ‘grabbing her shit’ and caught sight of her ambling off towards one of the doors, June watching her go. “If this is another one of Lex’s schemes, and I’ve _been_ involved with them, this... doesn’t bode well. After you showed me your prosthetic, I tried to get into contact with a few colleagues of mine, people who might be working with L-Corp to continue it, to possibly offer congratulations.”

There was a pause as the news in front of them showed the explosions going off again. Kara saving people. Addy even spotted herself, shoving James away from the crowd as people tried to rush away.

“Only very few of them responded. Some of them I expected nothing from, but I had a colleague who worked with this sort of thing extensively—and who worked with Lex extensively too, and he was completely silent. I’m worried about what might be going on behind the scenes that I don’t know about. All the researchers I know of who worked on Kryptonite with myself are unable to be contacted, and... that’s not a good thing.”

Emil leaned back, however, reaching up to rub tiredly at his face. “Saying that, though, I’m used to situations snowballing, getting massively worse before they improve. I could just be catastrophizing, but I’m scared that I’m not. I care a lot for Lena, see, and I’m worried that this is only the start.”

No, but he had a point. She had been a bit lax, lately, with preparations. Making sure things went well had always been part of who she was, and that wasn’t going to change now. With this reminder, she was certainly going to keep an ear to the ground more often. She probably wouldn’t be in a position to tell Emil anything she learned, but he raised enough good points - and Lena herself had become important enough at this point - to warrant it, nevertheless. She’d have to ask Alex to keep her updated.

“Alright Emil, stop bumming Addy out!” Serling yelled, or perhaps announced, it was hard to tell. Heads swivelled towards her, including Addy’s. She was standing in the middle of the room, a cardboard box with the L-Corp logo printed on it under one arm.

Walking over to the nearest table, she plopped it down.

“I think it might be best if we follow her example for once,” Emil replied dryly, rising from his seat with a grunt. “Just ignore me for now, Addy. If things do get worse, we will certainly know.”

Trailing after Emil, Addy arrived right next to Serling. Emil and June were there too, now, surrounding the cardboard box.

“I’ve already briefed everyone else on what we need to be doing, going into this,” Emil started, glancing her way. “But I’ll go over it again. Our current goal, and what we would’ve moved on to, had a bomb not been detonated, is recreating the tech.”

Addy blinked. Not entirely sure how to take that. They had the schematics for the black body field generator, it wasn’t like it was exactly hard to do.

“Until now, we’ve worked with _Lena’s_ tech, and as the woman herself found out during my time teaching her in University, sometimes that means ‘things people can’t build because it’s too advanced or has certain things only she somewhat gets’. The black body field generator is a powerful piece of technology, capable of interfering with wavelengths and other forms of energetic radiation on a level humans have yet to even remotely achieve. It could pioneer safety measures, it could pioneer _particle physics_ , quantum theory, and more. We’re experimenting with the fabric of the universe, with this piece of tech.”

Emil turned to stare at the box. “...and we have to make sure it’s even realistic to recreate.”

“See, we have all the programs to calibrate and control the device,” Serling picked up, beginning to pull apart the tape that kept the cardboard’s top flaps down. Inside were a series of microchips and motherboards, by Addy’s guess. “It’s just down to us actually making it, which we do have help with.” Without so much as a pause, she wheeled around, pointing off towards one of the walls.

Addy followed the direction of her gesture. On one of the walls was a corkboard, and on it was the schematics for the device, albeit in very, very small text, to help let it fit across the wall-sized corkboard in the first place.

“So, as an incentive—”

“Serling,” Emil started, his tone more than a little warning. “ _No_.”

“Serling _yes_ ,” Serling, of course, replied. “As an incentive, let's see who can make the most function out of the lot. Whoever does, wins.”

Which raised an honest question. “Wins what?”

Heads turned to stare at her, Serling especially. The woman paused, pursed her lips, then nodded sagely.

“Bragging rights.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so. Managed to get this out despite... everything, that's going on.
> 
> By virtue of this being an English website, you likely live either in the UK, US, or like me, Canada. I just want to say one thing for those of you living in the US: please, for the love of god, be safe. Do whatever you can to keep yourself okay and stuff, as it would be terrible for something awful to happen because of what's going on in your country right now.
> 
> Otherwise, uh. Yeah. Sorry if this chapter feels a bit... blurry. I was having trouble focusing on writing it, not unexpectedly. I hope you still enjoy, though.


	36. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets a gun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: This includes Addy having a bit of a meltdown/panic attack, so be warned!

Addy had begun to grow a faint distaste for elevators. Not, of course, that she didn’t understand their need; for buildings with tens of floors, one could not merely build escalators to reduce the strain it would have on everyone. Well, you _could_ , theoretically, but then you’d just have a building rather full of escalators without much space for anything else.

Not that any of this made elevators less boring. Especially the elevator in the building her apartment was housed in. Out of all of the ones she had to have semi-regular interaction with, it was certainly the worst. The CatCo elevator had been glossy and gold, interesting to look at for the few minutes it’d take for her to arrive at her former job. The L-Corp elevator had glass walls, letting you see the streets down below to ignore how awful it was to be shoved into a small, cramped space full of people.

This building’s elevator, meanwhile, was stainless steel. Shiny, sure, but ultimately boring, and had a bad habit of stalling out or taking much too long to manage the handful of floors it took to arrive at the apartment. It was cramped, it made odd, creaky noises that, with a body any less durable, might make her faintly uncomfortable, and regularly sported odd stains on the floor that made her shoes stick if she accidentally tread over them.

All-in-all, she had started to get a good idea as to why Kara’s rent was so low, even taking into account the apartment being grandfathered over from Alex.

It had been days since she’d started going to Serling’s to do her job, rather than the currently under repair L-Corp building. In those days, only moderate progress on the project had been made, and Addy had come to the rather startling conclusion that she had, somehow, underestimated the difficulties that would come with turning Lena’s black box field generator into a marketable product.

As it would turn out, a lot of what Lena understood seemed to have been kept in her head. There were certain things about recreating the black box field generator that they’d had to figure out on their own, by looking for the absence in logic from other parts of the schematics and mathematics behind it. They hadn’t been able to get in contact with Lena, largely because the woman’s schedule as a whole had been thoroughly overtaken by getting the building repaired, not unsurprisingly.

That wasn’t to say that they had made _no_ progress, necessarily. It was more that, in part due to Serling’s proclamation of a competition to see who could make the most viable one, nobody was bringing their various fields of expertise together. Something Addy was fairly certain was a reason why the team worked at all—the myriad backgrounds allowed for them to approach problems from different angles, and expectedly, breaking that formula resulted in different black box field generators focusing on different aspects.

As an example, her own black box field generator had become something of a tower, nearly 4 feet all told. She had been heavily reliant on the existing schematics to make heads or tails of diagrams, but where she lacked mechanical expertise, she certainly outdid everyone else in terms of mathematics. Making improvements and adjustments to what was there had netted her something more of a generator which broadcasted the field, passively disrupting a lot of ambient energy, as evidenced when it had caused half of the lab to stop working properly. It wasn’t _strong_ , though, not as the original had been, and Addy had come up against a wall finding a way to restrict where the disruptions took place.

Meanwhile, June had created more of a sprawl of open-faced circuitry which worked whenever something was above it, and worked _good_ , but had a bad habit of discharging dangerous bolts of electricity without a moment’s notice. Serling had leaned on her experience with compact technology and had made the smallest out of everyone’s, but one which she’d had to recreate four separate times at this point due to the design’s habit of explosively overheating. Finally, Emil’s was perhaps the most conventional and least dangerous; merely a perfect cube with the schematic inside, a baseline more so than anything else, which worked a little less efficiently than Lena’s had, but nonetheless still worked.

The doors finally pulled open, startling her from her thoughts. The hallway leading towards the apartment stared back at her, and before she could drift back off into the labyrinthine schematics and progress reports she had been mostly occupied with over the last few days, Addy slipped out through the elevator and started making her way towards the apartment.

A few dozen steps in, and she started to hear it—chatter. Low, almost indistinct, but Kara’s floor was rather notoriously empty, and she could always tell that voice out from a crowd. Kara was home.

It was somewhat distressing that something like that could be a surprise, as of late, but it was. Kara hadn’t been home with much or really _any_ frequency over the last few days. Even with Clark around, all that new alien tech that had started circulating through the criminal underworld had turned your average shoot-out into ones involving lasers that could, in a pinch, actually discourage Kara a little. Not _hurt_ her, of course, but there was a tangible difference between being unmoving in the face of a hail of gunfire from handguns and being thrown through a brick wall because that same gang now invested in particle cannons.

Arriving at the apartment door, the voices louder, her fingers buzzing and vibrating, Addy fed her key into the lock, twisted, and pushed the door open.

Well, actually. Scratch that. Kara _and_ Clark were home. Both in costume, and both looking shades of exhausted.

Kara and Clark were sitting opposite one another in the living room, Kara on the couch, Clark in a chair. Kara’s costume was spattered with soot at seemingly random intervals, and Clark’s cape had a long, ugly-looking brownish stain smeared down it. Kara was slumped over, thumbing at the bridge of her nose, head turned towards her, while Clark was dragging fingers through his hair and staring in her general direction.

“Hey, Ads,” Kara announced, her voice tired and more than a little weary. “How was work?”

Easing the door shut behind her and making sure the lock was twisted back into place, Addy started easing her jacket off. “Explosive.”

“...Is that a good thing?” Clark’s voice asked, just barely overheard from where it was murmured.

There was the sound of shifting fabric, a gentle sigh. “Generally,” came Kara’s reply.

Kicking her shoes off, Addy ferried herself and her laptop bag over towards the kitchen first, pulling the fridge open to retrieve another calorie bar, just to finish off her necessary intake for the day. After popping it between her teeth, she ambled over to the couch, where Kara scooted over a little to give her some space, letting her drop down on the opposite end to her and ease her laptop onto the table, fishing it out of its bag before flipping it open.

The sound of one of the local newscasters drew her gaze, though, if only to check if she could find the remote. After a quick scouring over the coffee table to little effect, she decided to abandon that plan. The news could remain, for now.

“Thanks for letting me take a breather, here,” Clark said, likely to Kara. Still, Addy peeked her eyes up from her computer screen, where her laptop was still chugging away on a simulation, to check.

Kara just smiled wanly. “It’s totally okay, it’s gotten a bit... hectic, as of late.”

“Are you sure you can handle this without me? I’m... heading back to Metropolis, soon.”

Addy tuned them out for now. The conversation seemed personal enough that she probably shouldn’t _try_ to eavesdrop. That and, to be quite honest, she’d been expecting Clark to head home sometime soon. Not that she disliked his presence, the fact that he was around was, rather, very nice when the occasion arose to be around him, but he had his duties elsewhere. Not to mention that Superman being in National City for this long made a lot of people think that something was going on that they didn’t know about, rather than just some violent family bonding.

Still, a few checks over her email, the chatroom, and her simulation revealed, as expected, she had little to distract herself with on her computer. She could continue to update her goose video archive, but then while she was certainly always in the mood for geese, she wasn’t always in the mood for archival efforts, especially when scraping videos and research papers tended to involve a lot of downloading, which itself - because humanity had yet to try to really upgrade their internet capacity - took a while.

Without anything better to do, and very intent on avoiding the elephant in the room that was Kara and Clark’s ongoing conversation, Addy cast her eyes to the television.

On it was a live feed of a bridge. It was late enough that the sky had begun to darken, meaning everything was cast in a half-glare, spotlights from overhead helicopters raking over the surface of the bridge. The camera, wobbly though it was, zoomed in on a man near the edge of the bridge. His face was concealed by his hood, and he wore baggy clothing otherwise.

A jumper, then.

Skating her eyes off to the side, she caught sight of both Kara and Clark staring at it as well.

“At least it’s not another Empurian with a hand cannon?” Clark hedged, already rising from his seat.

Kara’s eyes flit towards Clark, before recentering on the television. Addy watched her take a moment to breathe in deep and let it out slow, a steady breath. “One last one?” She asked, rising as well.

Clark nodded, then, against all logic, focused back on her. “Addy?”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to—well, help?” It wasn’t judgemental. He was just asking, and Addy could appreciate that.

Especially when her answer was rather frank. “No thank you,” she replied, eyes turning away from the television to tab back over to her simulation software. Another 3%, only 41% more to go. She really needed an upgrade, possibly to something alien that could run the numbers on things without taking the better part of an afternoon to do so. “I am fairly certain me being there will have little actual benefit. I believe you two can handle it.”

That was all there was to it, as well. Not long after, Addy listened to the sound of shuffling boots and the eventual _woosh_ of flight as both Clark and Kara took off out of the opened window. Mostly out of curiosity, she cast her gaze up towards the television, where the scene was ongoing. Police cars had arrived to block off the bridge and to hopefully coax the man down from the ledge, though their attempts seemed to be doing very little, if anything at all.

A few moments later, both Kara and Clark appeared, curling in from off the side of the bridge to land in the open space the police cars had made available. The camera was quick to zoom in on them, though the person narrating over the ongoing scene mentioned they didn’t have any audio available due to the lack of proximity.

Kara and Clark hesitated, just a few feet away from where the man was standing on the raised platform of the railing, looking down into the water below. The two of them stepped forward as one, and Kara’s mouth moved as she said something the helicopter couldn’t pick up.

Whatever Kara said though, it had an effect. The man turned, slowly, and for the first time, Addy got a good look at the man’s face. His ethnicity wasn’t clear, but it was ambiguously Asian. Mixed, she was fairly certain, as she couldn’t tell if he was Korean, Chinese or some combination of the two. His skin was more tanned, though, and he had a head of dark hair. His features were, otherwise, fairly bland, if passably aesthetically appealing.

For a moment, they just stared at one another. Clark’s mouth moved, so did Kara’s, but the man didn’t respond. It was only when Clark took a single step forward that something changed.

That, in this case, being the man’s hoodie burning away around his chest to reveal that someone had grafted a metal array into it, studded in the dead center with a hunk of painfully familiar green crystal. Kara and Clark both reeled, moving back, but the man thrust his chest forward and a beam of concentrated green energy jumped across the ground, catching Clark in the chest and sending him sprawling.

Before Addy could even think of doing anything, the fight erupted in an instant. The man said something that, again, she couldn’t pick up on, before firing another beam of green directly into Clark, already laid out across the concrete, the ground having cratered somewhat around him. Clark writhed on the ground, cracks of green running across his person as he grappled for any surface he could use to move away.

Kara turned on him, face twisting into anger as she drew her arm back and punched with what Addy knew was no small amount of force.

The man didn’t even budge as it took him across his chin, and Kara stumbled back a few steps, eyes widening in horror as, with a simple half-gesture, the man backhanded her in turn. Kara was sent back through the air, crashing into one of the police cars, the occupants of which rushed out in a group as Kara made to peel herself out of it, the three or four cops running back towards the perimeter line.

The man walked, slow and easy, over to Clark, where he reached down and began pressing him into the ground. The concrete around them splintered as the man began to punch, one-after-another, a veritable hail of physical abuse that was only stopped when, off-camera, twin beams were shot from Kara’s eyes, the man relinquishing Clark to block the incoming beams with his arm. Skin lit up, heated to immense levels, and disintegrated away from a metal skeleton underneath, turned to burning embers in the air.

All that was left, from shoulder-to-hand, was metal. Clearly cybernetic in nature, someone had replaced the man’s entire skeleton with a material Addy couldn’t put heads or tails to. Not that she got much time to observe, as the man twisted back around to fire another blast of what she was fairly certain was kryptonite radiation at Kara, who leapt into the air to avoid it, having to stop using her eye beams. The man didn’t hesitate, though, firing out two, three, four, and Kara could only avoid so many; the last of which slamming into her chest and sending her toppling over the lip of the bridge.

In a blur, the cybernetically enhanced man was thrown away by Clark, flung off into the distance off the other side of the bridge to the one Kara had fallen from. Clark erupted into flight immediately after, twisting around and ducking below the bridge, going out of sight. For a moment, there was only silence, all for but the keening in her ears and the ratatat of her heart, then, with great care, Clark emerged from below the lip of the bridge, Kara held in a bridal hold, unconscious.

She should’ve done so earlier, but Addy was already on her feet, head reeling. Emil’s words rang in her head, the notion that this wasn’t the end. That there was something more to this that they were all missing. The attack on Lena was clearly just the beginning; something worse was brewing in the background, and something she had just let _happen_ by not accompanying the two of them.

It was a familiar burst of emotion that made her stop, though. She hadn’t experienced much of it, but she knew it from before, during the red kryptonite incident. Rage, anger, she felt it rush through her, she felt and refused to act on the urge to put her hand through the wall. She wanted to scream and shout and to hunt that man down and _hurt him_ —but, but—

Addy took in a deep breath, let it out. There was a knot in her throat, heavy and unrelenting, but she couldn’t do any of that. If Kara was hurt, she had to go and make sure she would be okay. Kara wasn’t _supposed_ to get hurt, she was invincible, she was supposed to be _safe_.

Addy twisted around and made her way towards where she put her costume. 

* * *

Her feet touched ground in the D.E.O., and everyone turned to look. Addy kept her stride straight, forward, pacing in a straight line towards where she had a vague understanding of where J’onn would be. She did her best, at this moment, to imitate Taylor during her days as Skitter; refusing to look at others, making them get out of her way, first and foremost.

To the agent’s credit, they did. People ducked, avoided her path with a wide berth, and she wasn’t sure if that was because they knew a collision might happen or if it was because she was keeping her face purposefully void of expression. She didn’t care, either, as each step carried her closer to where Kara _should_ be. Had to be, or she was going to have to go and hunt down Clark, for better or for worse.

It took her barely a dozen steps before she started to hear it. Ranting, arguing, raised voices; J’onn and Clark, snapping back and forth at one another.

“—that only the D.E.O. had access to kryptonite,” Clark was saying, voice thick with a dangerous sort of anger. “So how would you like to explain what just happened out there? A _kryptonite-charged cyborg_ nearly killed my cousin! Almost killed me!’

There was only silence, which wasn’t helping Addy navigate to where they were, but she prowled quickly in the direction of Clark’s voice, nevertheless.

“Start talking, J’onn!”

“A shipment went missing four months ago,” was J’onn’s reply, calm but not in the way he was normally calm. It was a stifled sort of calm, forced and uncomfortable. “We’ve done all we can to find it.”

“ _Went missing?_ Four months ago? When were you going to tell us?!”

Her temper spiked again, finding herself lost. Annoyance overcame her focus, made her eyes drift from the hallway. She reached out with her powers haphazardly, shoved the gate open, and forced her awareness _out_. In an instant, she had their location; only a little deeper into the building, a place where they normally weren’t.

“Stolen,” J’onn clarified. “We thought it was an inside job, but everyone in the transport came up clean.”

“So you have a mole.”

“We don’t know that,” was J’onn’s rebuke, voice a bit gravelly.

“If you had gotten rid of it when I _told you to_ —”

The arguing picked up again, but Addy tuned it out. She picked up her pace, her stride nearly escalating into a sprint, as she crawled through the maze-like inner structure of the building before emerging out through a doorway, right into one of many mission areas. Heads turned in an instant, from Clark to J’onn to the agents scattered around the place. No Kara, though, and no Alex. She was probably elsewhere, helping her. Hopefully.

Winn, from a corner of the room, looked nervously in her direction. She ignored him.

“Explain,” Addy said, and wasn’t sure what exactly she was hearing in her own voice. It sounded faintly unfamiliar to her own ears, a certain type of monotone replaced for another. The others, she knew, noticed, as J’onn almost visibly cringed in response to it.

Who did she have to get rid of, to make sure Kara wasn’t hurt again?

Clark was the one to step up. After a hard, angry glare at J’onn, his attention was directed fully onto Addy, and despite the discomfort that brought, she grit her teeth through it. “A kryptonite cyborg,” he explained, a bit haltingly. “Called himself Metallo—he was strong, and weakened our powers by sheer prox—”

The monitors in the room crackled, going fuzzy at once. Addy’s head snapped towards it as the static fell away to reveal a truly _ugly_ CGI face. It was white, mostly featureless, with untextured eyes and a flat, black background. The static of the video remained somewhat, flickering back and forth across the screen.

“ _People of National City_ ,” a voice began, as distorted by the static as the image was. “ _The earth has been stolen from us_.”

The image changed with a flicker. First to a power pole, a vantage point overlooking the city. Then to a crude, distorted image of Kara herself, with blackened spots obscuring the exact activity she was taking part in.

“ _And the enemy has come in the guise of heroes_.”

Another change, with what looked like x-ray print outs, then to an image of Superman mid-flight, then to some candid footage captured from the time when Karsta - if Addy was remembering her name right - had dragged her lasers through the CatCo building. From the inside, it had been bad enough, but from the outside, just from the way that shrapnel and rubble fell, it was quite the sight. Screams were overlaid over the video, despite the fact that Addy knew there hadn’t been any; Myriad had affected everyone but them. There wasn’t anyone who could’ve screamed in the first place.

“ _They say they come in peace, to protect us from ourselves_ ,” the voice continued. The image shifted again, once back to the face to finish the sentence, before swapping over to an image of the president and vice president at a podium. “ _But how long will it be until these gods decide to rule instead of serve?_ ”

Another image change, this time to a shoot-out between humans and aliens that Addy had a vague recollection of happening over the last few days. The humans and aliens both were outfitted in alien technology, laser pistols for the most part, which wicked across the ground, leaving molten scars wherever they passed.

“ _We are the antidote to their poison._ ”

The image changed to an overview of the planet, satellites in motion around it.

“ _We are the scientists who will show them what humans are capable of._ ”

The face was back, plain and white, as the House of El symbol burned like paper behind it.

“ _Those who have sided with the invaders will not be spared. You cannot stop us, we are everywhere._ ”

The screen zoomed in, right up to the CGI face, static beginning to fill in around the edges again as the signal frayed.

“ _We are Cadmus._ ”

The screens blinked, then went completely black.

“Cadmus, announcing themselves to the world,” Winn said slowly, already drifting back towards where the computers were.

“Declaring open war,” Clark agreed, voice tense, horrified. “They want to kill us—all of us.”

“Agent Schott, pull the anti-kryptonite tech out of storage,” J’onn said, almost a bark. Out of the corner of her eye, Addy watched Winn nod rapidly, rushing off towards one of the storage sheds.

Slowly, she listened as J’onn grew near to her. His hands reached down, and with careful fingers, he touched both of hers, both her robotic hand and her flesh one. Her eyes tracked down to where they touched, where both of her hands had been balled up as tight as she could make them, not that she’d noticed she was doing it. Her flesh hand stung from where her nails bit into palm, and her robotic hand was clicking, grinding, hitching as the servos tried and failed to match her nerves.

“Breathe,” J’onn said, slowly, and Addy let herself listen. She took a breath in, then out, and she felt the rage that had been ever-present since Kara fell in the first place finally begin to peel away. Her fingers loosened, then went limp entirely, falling back down to her sides.

The world gradually came back into focus, the paralyzing intent she’d felt when watching the video leaking out slowly, bit-by-bit. Gradually, she managed to peel her eyes away from the blank screens, towards J’onn, who was staring at her with a worried expression.

“I—” her voice came out in a croak, hoarse. “Want to see Kara.”

* * *

The room Kara was in was sterile and bland. It was out-of-the-way, off one of the various narrow hallways she hadn’t put to memory. It was big, with two beds in it, each one outfitted with a sun-lamp. The only occupied one, at the moment, had Kara in it, golden light beaming down directly onto her person. Alex, in a chair at the side of the bed, had one hand holding the fringe of her hair away from her face as she stared down at a clipboard.

Kara looked... weak. It struck Addy in the chest, almost knocked the breath out of her. Ensconced in the sunbed, sheets pooling up around her, she looked half-dead. Her skin was tinged an awful green, her face was drawn and wan, and her body was completely limp where it lay. Her hair pooled on the pillow they’d placed beneath her head, but even with that, her face was screwed up in a rictus of pain, despite being unconscious.

Addy’s legs more led her there, rather than walking with conscious effort. Alex tried to say something to her, but she wasn’t listening. Arriving at the side of the bed, she reached out, just to be sure, just to know that she was still _there_ and not dead.

The second her fingers touched Kara, they burned. Hives erupted across her fingers in merely a few seconds, and the raw pain that came from the contact hurt enough to almost make her pull away. Still, she could feel it, beneath the growing numbness in her digits and the ratcheting pain: Kara’s heartbeat, a bit faint, but very much there.

“Addy, what the hell?!”

Another hand grabbed her own, tore it away from Kara’s chest, and without the strength usually afforded to that arm, she could do nothing to resist it. Alex had her hand, and was looking at her in horror, flipping the flesh of her hand around to check for any further hives or rashes, of which some had started to crawl from her palm up her wrist.

“The readings from the site are troubling,” J’onn’s voice interrupted, Addy looking towards him, if only for guidance. Alex was still looking over her hand, muttering something that she wasn’t really picking up on. “The area where you and Supergirl fought—Metallo, correct?”

J’onn looked off to the side, and Addy followed the gaze. She hadn’t noticed that Clark had come with them, hadn’t been thinking about him, and it made something in her head sour. She should’ve noticed he was there, that he was trying to help her, but she hadn’t. She had just... focused too much.

Clark, unaware of her inner monologue, merely nodded a stiff sort of nod.

“It’s heavily contaminated with kryptonite radiation. By my estimate, it would be enough to weaken both of you outright.” J’onn’s eyes turned to her, then, and so did everybody else’s. She could even feel Alex staring at her head, just off to the side. “And it would be horrifically toxic for Addy to go there, even half-an-hour after the incident took place.”

The hives along the surface of her skin had started to recede steadily, now more raised, angry welts along the surface of her hand, aborting at around the mid-forearm. A rash around the palm of her hand had cracked, and was now sluggishly bleeding, with Alex already grabbing at some sterile wipes to dab the blood away as it came.

Addy took in a breath, tried to recenter herself. Tried to get her mind to _work_ , to stop being so paralyzed.

“I can’t in good conscience let you take part in any operations against Metallo, Addy.”

She knew it was about to come, she _knew_ , but it hurt. Something like rage curled up in her again, and the instinct to destroy came over her again. To punch and kick and rip and do all the things she knew she was better for not doing. Inadequacy was not something she was used to, neither was rejection; if she was stronger, she _could_ help. She had to help.

“Why,” she asked, already knowing the answer, but wanting a path to take. Any path.

“Going by the values,” Alex picked up, finally relinquishing her hand, though maneuvering herself so that she couldn’t touch Kara anymore. She raised her clipboard up, as if for emphasis. “It would incapacitate you by mere proximity. Coupled with that, his attacks would likely be very lethal, similar to your response to having red kryptonite purged from your body.”

“We are getting Winn working on that anti-kryptonite tech,” J’onn said, as if trying to console her. As if she _needed_ it. “But even with that, the risk is too high. Unless it can be provably perfected, without a high risk of failure, I can’t let you.”

She knew that. She knew this, she knew the risks. She played with risks before, Taylor was a risk, so was going along with the plan to take down The Warrior. Every independent action she had managed to take when a part of the network had been a _risk_. She had done risks, she could do risks. She had to. He hurt Kara, it would only be fair if she returned the favour. “I want to help.”

“Addy, you—”

If proximity was a problem, then so be it. “Give me a ranged weapon,” she said, cutting J’onn off. Disrespectful, rude, but she had to. Had to make her case. “I can use flight to gain a vantage point on him, remain outside of the radiation.”

“Addy—” J’onn tried, again.

“Give me. A. Gun.”

“I don’t think—” Clark began.

She wheeled on him, unable to stop herself. She felt the rise of hormones in her body, the firing of synapses, something she’d know to look out for when it came to signs of a breakdown. She ignored them, let the rush fill her, let herself feel. “You don’t get to tell me what I can and cannot do!” She spat, nerves buzzing, head swimming and almost dizzy with all of it.

There was a firm, sharp _clap_ that cut through the oncoming conversation.

Addy snapped her head around, catching sight of the person. It was Susan, in her fatigues, looking rather tired as she leaned against the open door. “If the girl wants a gun, I can help her there.”

“...Agent Vasquez,” J’onn started, voice thick with warning.

“I think you’re all forgetting something,” Susan began, keeping her focus wholly on Addy. “You can’t stop her. I can’t stop her. Supergirl is, in truth, the only person she seems to listen to, and she’s currently unconscious as her body repairs itself.”

Addy wasn’t much of a fan of being spoken of as though she wasn’t in the room, but she could forgive Susan on the basis of making a good case for her. Her approval of the woman ticked up minutely, as much as it could with her head swimming as it was.

The room was silent with those words, almost a stunned sort of silence as the reality of the situation clearly began to settle in.

Addy would help, one way or another. She knew that. A risk it might be, but it would be a risk she would take if it meant ensuring Kara wasn’t hurt again. She had to be sure, had to get rid of just the chance.

“So, the best option here is to go along with the alternative that gives her the tools to keep herself from being killed, no?” Susan finished, motioning vaguely.

Addy turned her gaze to J’onn and Clark, both of whom were staring at her. Their eyes strayed from her and back to one another. A shared glance, something mutual that Addy couldn’t decipher.

J’onn sighed heavily, reaching up to rub over his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “I’ll sign off on it.”

* * *

The D.E.O.’s armoury was full of a lot of things. The metal walls were covered in shelves, upon which row-after-row guns of varying types laid. Sometimes, a locker or two would be placed between them, some left open to reveal the body armour within. Interspersed throughout tactical ballistic weaponry was itself a good variety of alien tech, even some of the weapons she’d seen starting to circulate amongst the criminal element having their place along the walls.

Other things were there, too, not merely restricted to guns. There was a skeletal frame of power armour next to a glowing green sabre, kept currently inside of a leaded glass case. There were shields, some more conventional riot shields, others being shields made from flickering energy. Small trinket-like objects were sitting around too, along with yet more tactical armour, tools, and others. It reminded her more so of the place where the D.E.O. researchers used to try to figure out alien tech, though it would appear a recent policy change had started putting those inventions to greater use.

“This is the rifle rack,” Susan continued to explain, motioning to a small section of the wall. True to the name, it was full of the more conventional semi-automatic rifles you could find. A lot of them Addy could even remember from Taylor’s own memories - as clearly things weren’t _that_ different - but many more looked foreign, if human-made. They’d mostly chosen something long ranged by virtue of her now having the capacity to operate them, what with the two arms.

Still, she ran the mathematics over in her head as she glanced between sniper rifles and more tactical mid-ranged options. There was even an alien device, a long, conal-shaped thing that had a small note beneath it stating it could take almost any type of bullet. Apparently, it was of Trombusan make, to whatever ends that may imply quality, Addy wasn’t sure.

“...Addy?”

She didn’t look away, continuing to glance over the options. She needed something with range, a lot of it, and enough tactical equipment to help augment her ability to feel wind change.

“She’s going to be okay, you know that, right?”

The words made her jolt, harsh. Her hand reached out to grab for something to stop the flinch, only for her palm to press through the stock of some military-grade chunk of metal, the scream of materials bending beneath her strength an annoying and persistently painful inclusion to the silence. She hadn’t done that before, she hadn’t—lost control.

But then, she hadn’t been in a situation like this. “She shouldn’t’ve been hurt in the first place,” she said, slowly, trying to get the words out. To get thoughts into place. Her head was a mess, she was so, _so_ angry, so much irritation crawled beneath her skin. They should’ve protected her, Addy should’ve—

“I don’t disagree,” Susan said, voice oddly quiet. “But Supergirl, she’ll be okay—”

“She shouldn’t have to _BE OKAY_!”

She didn’t know what came over her, what made her raise her voice to yell. She hadn’t, before, maybe she was drawing on Taylor’s memories, maybe she wasn’t. She felt detached from the actions of her body, like she’d taken a step back into being a shard, a forced observer as hormones swirled and her brain fired off against her willingness to.

She sucked in a breath of air, her eyes burning, feeling raw.

“She’s invulnerable—she’s _safe_. Kara is supposed to be safe, she’s not supposed to get hurt!”

“Addy—”

She felt herself shift, hunching down, her body working without her say-so. It wasn’t a loss of control, really, she was in control, abstractly. Nobody else but herself was controlling this outburst, she was just... not in any place to stop it. Her chest tightened, she felt her breath come out choppier, harsher. Her rear hit the hard ground and her back pressed painfully against the guns she was now cornering herself against.

If she had just known, she wouldn’t be alone. Taylor would still be there. _Kara_ wouldn’t be on that bed.

Her hands reached up, grabbed at her hair, a thoughtless gesture she was unable to stop. Her breathing grew choppier, started getting caught in her chest, a flutter of panic rising up, up, up—

“Hey, hey. Shh, shh.” Susan reached out, and—

Addy jolted away, instinctually.

“Okay, no touching,” Susan said, her voice the only thing she could use to identify the woman, what with her gaze now wholly centred on the ground. “Okay, Addy, I need you to breathe with me, okay?”

Her words overlapped with J’onn’s, not long ago. She’d fallen again, too quick. If she’d been better, nothing like this would’ve happened, if she had just _fixed_ things, nobody would be hurt. Still, she nodded, jolting her head back and forth, listened to Susan’s voice as she guided her, slowly, through rhythmic breathing. Slowly, measurably, each second refusing to pass without notice, she felt herself gradually reclaim her calm.

In the wake of her panic, though, her body felt different. Her head was aching, a low unpleasant hum that reminded her of the time she’d partially fused with J’onn to gain access to his abilities. Her skin felt like it was vibrating, or buzzing, and despite calming down, the anger was still there. It still burned, hot and heavy, but at least she had an idea about where it came from. What it was.

Mortality, she knew, was scary. It was a foreign concept to her, if not to Taylor. Taylor had had many people die in her life, had received trauma-after-trauma for her duties. Addy hadn’t. Addy hadn’t died, hadn’t known anything to die until Taylor. Until the ticking clock that was her energy resources had come into play.

“There we go,” Susan soothed, so gentle. “Hi.”

Addy blinked up at her, relinquished her hands from her hair, letting her arms flop weakly into her lap. She swallowed, worked her tongue around in her mouth until she was sure she could speak. “Hello.”

Susan let out a huff, gradually easing herself down into a crouch so that they could be eye-level, not that Susan was looking her in the eyes, thankfully. “I wanna tell you something, okay? So just, listen to me.”

Addy’s next few blinks were sluggish, her head felt cottony, thick with fog. She breathed out, in, tried to recapture her thoughts, but got nothing. Eventually, with little else to do, she merely nodded.

“You’re allowed to be scared of losing others. It’s totally normal, it’s _natural_ ; you cherish things, we all do. From animals to plants to people. We all have that part of ourselves. My wife is scared of losing me all the time, and we’ve been married since I first left the military.”

Something sad flickered over Susan’s face, at that. Something bittersweet. “But Addy,” she said, with great carefulness. “You have to understand—you’re allowed to freak out, to be upset, but this isn’t... the end. Supergirl got hurt, yes—”

Addy opened her mouth—

“—Ah, bup-bup. Let me finish.”

She shut it.

“Supergirl got hurt, and we were all scared. Even I was. Nobody wants to see Supergirl get injured or, god forbid, die. But she’s been hurt before, Addy, you might not have been around at the time, but she has been, and she’s always recovered. Remember when she got captured by the Jailer?”

It took a moment to draw the memories out from the fog of her brain, but she did remember and nodded to confirm as much.

“Everyone, including Agent Danvers, freaked the _fuck_ out. We were all terrified, but... the thing about being scared for others is that we can’t let it consume us. Not everything is in our control, Addy, especially not other people. We have to just do our best to ensure, despite other people’s actions, they come out of it okay.”

“They didn’t want me to do this,” came tumbling out of Addy’s mouth before she could think better of it. J’onn’s words percolated around her head, echoing, her mind flicking back to the moment where he’d told her he didn’t want her help. Couldn’t take it, not with the risk. “They wanted to stop me from helping. Wanted to leave it up to them.”

“Addy,” Susan said, with something of a sigh. “That’s because people want to protect you too. It’s not just the kryptonite, by my estimate, people may respect you but a lot of the upper brass views you as... well, younger. Less prepared. You have to understand, you don’t do much outside of special missions—you don’t patrol, and that’s fine. In fact, I would argue it’s good, considering it might stretch our tracking resources thin to follow both of you. But they don’t want you to get involved because it was a _risk_ for you.”

“Sufficient force kills anyone,” she found herself arguing. “Why do they get to risk themselves, but not me?”

“See, that’s the thing. I don’t think they were in the right, either, to prevent you from taking part in this. Sure, safety concerns _are_ something to be considered, but it’s more complicated than that. You are an asset that would help us in any given circumstance, especially when you’re out of the line of fire, and to argue that with you is childish and fearful.”

Slowly, with great care, Addy found herself nodding.

Susan, rising back to her feet, extended a hand out towards her, palm outstretched, but not close enough to feel uncomfortable. It felt like an olive branch, a sign that they were still okay.

Addy took the hand, and let herself get eased to her feet. She felt... wobbly, if calmer. Her entire body felt loose, like at any moment it might fold over. It was almost anxiety-inducing on its own, but after a few seconds on her feet, she found stability again.

“I saw you looking at the Trombusan rifle,” Susan said, relinquishing her hand as she padded over towards where it was. With a short hop, she snatched the rifle from its place along the wall, easing it down. “Do you want to hear about it?”

Addy found herself nodding again.

“Well, speaking of the Jailer, we picked this one out of his ship. It’s a bit more sophisticated than the rest, it has some sort of on-board AI which lets it adjust its barrel and firing power to shoot any form of bullet, given some limitations.” She shuffled back towards Addy, extended it out. “You want to hold it?”

Reaching out wordlessly, she took it from Susan. Unsurprisingly, it weighed little-to-nothing with her strength, but she found herself adjusting to older memories from Taylor’s gun classes. She pressed the stock against her inner arm, slid it into a proper holding position. It was a bit cumbersome near the base, as it was conal-shaped after all, but it still felt relatively okay.

Susan reached over, tapping one of the few buttons along the surface. A short noise of shifting machinery played out before a single scope popped out near the top. Glancing into it, the magnification was strong enough to be disorienting.

“It’ll do,” she said, at last, staring down at it. “High calibre rounds will be necessary if I intend to fight from a distance.”

“You do not have to worry about that,” Susan said, voice faintly relieved. “We have more than enough high-calibre ammunition to last us a lifetime.”

Before Addy could properly ask about that, there was a knock at the armoury door. A few seconds later, the door itself pulled open, and Alex’s head emerged from behind it, staring at them.

“Supergirl’s awake.”

* * *

Kara’s hospital room had changed somewhat in the fifteen or so minutes they’d been gone. Winn had maneuvered himself into one corner, where he had established his computer set-up, a myriad of screens flicking through faces and names. Next to the displays, a small metal tray had a few pieces of tech pulled apart, its contents revealed, alongside what looked to be a soldering iron.

Alex had gone ahead of them, or rather, ahead of Addy, as Susan had hung back to put the gun away, waving her off and telling her to go and see Kara. Alex was, as of this moment, standing right next to Winn, looking over details with him while J’onn and Clark, surprisingly peacefully, stood watch over Kara.

Tired, blue eyes stared up at her from the tangle of blonde hair haloed around her head, blinking slowly, eyes drooping. Her complexion had cleared up some, since the last time Addy had seen her, transitioning from that horrid greenish tint to something paler. A tremulous smile slowly stretched across her face as she stepped forward, once, twice, then covering the remainder of the ground until she, took, stood next to the bed.

Reaching out once again, this time without Alex trying to stop her, Addy took Kara’s hand. The grip she got in return was still weak, but she could more accurately feel the heartbeat there, strumming away healthy and hale. “Do you feel any nausea, numbness?” she asked, beginning to go down the list of things Taylor had been asked, in her past, after a few close scrapes.

Kara made a mumbly noise, waving sluggishly at her with her other arm. “Don’t fuss so much over me,” she murmured tiredly, if jokingly. “Alex already did as much.”

“And Alex,” the woman in question cut in. “Thinks we should probably talk about what we’re going to be doing about all of this.”

“I, uh, may actually have an answer to that,” Winn piped up, drawing Addy’s attention.

Turning her head around, Addy spotted Winn’s set up again. Rather than scrolling through names and faces, one painfully familiar one stood out. The same face of the man who had attacked Clark and Kara, smiling politely into the camera while wearing what looked to be a suit. There was a lanyard dangling around his neck, at the end of which was a card reading, simply, ‘LUTHOR CORP’.

“This, my friends, is Kim Gilchrist, a scientist who used to work in the medical branch of the then-named Luthor Corp, under one Emil Hamilton.” Winn gestured towards the screens again, a touch awkwardly. “He was heavily involved in the research for prosthetics and obtained several awards for his work in low-energy prosthetics, primarily fueled using...”

“Kryptonite,” Clark finished, his voice grim.

Winn merely nodded. “When everyone involved in Luthor Corp’s medical team got swamped with allegations? Well, he and a _lot_ of his friends jumped ship. Or rather, jumped to another, equally racist ship.”

“Cadmus,” Alex said, with a certain firmness to her voice.

“As far as the government documentation is willing to say,” Winn conceded.

“But... if that’s the case—why did they turn him into Metallo? He’s a researcher,” Clark pointed out, face cramping. “Why do this to one of the few people who have the expertise?”

“That I believe I know,” J’onn announced. “Agent Schott, do bring up the security footage relating to John Corben’s transport two days ago.” His voice was sure, aware, as though he’d just stumbled onto a revelation. He very well might have, in all honesty.

Winn did as requested, tabbing away from the face and going over the security camera footage, drawing it up. For a moment, the screen merely showed a heavy, armoured transport vehicle, before, gradually, people began to filter onto the screen. Officers and soldiers pulled the doors open as a pair of medics pushed John Corben, strapped to a stretcher, into the back. He was clearly unconscious, likely sedated.

The medical staff vanished back off screen while the guardsmen piled in behind the stretcher, shutting the doors. The other members of the transport began to get in as well, pulling open passenger doors and speaking into radios.

Then, there was a sudden noise.

A black van, with tinted windows, screamed onto the screen, skidding out just next to the armoured vehicle. The back doors of the van flung open as armoured, black-clad men poured out, weapons upraised, shouting demands.

The guardsmen, in turn, stumbled out of the armoured vehicle, but it was already too late. The weapons in the attackers' hands exploded with light, long lasers carving chunks off of the armoured vehicle as the guards scattered, trying to find some cover. One of the guards had his head cleaved in half by an errant crescent of energy, slumping dead to the ground.

Just as the black-clad individuals began to make their way towards the transport, more people came into view on the screen. These ones, she knew, were D.E.O. agents, equipped with ballistic, human weaponry, but in much higher numbers than the attackers. Two of the attackers dropped like flies in the first few seconds of the confrontation while the others tried to reel back around on the ambush, only for a third to get shot through the head and for the remainder to begin to flee.

As they scrambled to retreat, the video paused, then zoomed in. One of the black-clad men, despite his hair being covered by a helmet and his eyes by a tinted visor, was clearly Gilchrist. He had the same expression, and he was armed much less than the others, likely due to a lack of experience.

“I believe they were going to turn John Corben into Metallo rather immediately after getting access to him,” J’onn explained. “Even when I didn’t know about their exact plans for John Corben, I put a D.E.O. detachment on the transport to ensure any attempt to remove him from the playing field would be met with force. He knows too much about the Luthors for his capture to go unresponded to.”

“And when Gilchrist failed...” Winn started, but faltered, trailing off.

“If they did that to one of the researchers,” Alex started, horror creeping up into her voice. “Someone who would know all they needed to know about this, all because he _failed_ , and my _father_ is there, what... what are they doing to him?”

Addy turned her head towards Alex, whose face had gone rather pallid. She was breathing hard.

“We’ll find him,” Kara said, voice ringing across the room like a bell.

After a moment, Alex relaxed and nodded.

“But we have no leads to find Cadmus,” J’onn pointed out, somewhat tiredly.

“About that,” Clark began, reaching into one of his suit’s pockets. After a moment, he retrieved a sliver of metal, maybe the size of a quarter, and held it out in his hand. “This is something I broke off of Metallo during the fight. I intend to bring it to the Fortress, to be scanned.”

“And I could use that data to hopefully find any trace signatures of it,” Winn pointed out, getting a nod from Clark.

“We can also track kryptonite signals,” Alex said, at last, finding her center again.

J’onn glanced towards Clark. “May I come with you?” he asked, almost awkwardly.

Clark boggled a bit at him. “If you’re okay with the temperature,” he said, just as awkwardly.

“Martians are vulnerable to fire, Superman, not the cold.”

Clark shrugged, a bit sheepishly. “You never know.”

J’onn was silent for a moment before, with a nod, he acquiesced. “I suppose not.”

Turning her gaze away from those two, Addy watched Alex rush over to Winn and begin to talk in low, murmuring tones. Something about the stolen shipment, something about getting the kryptonite shields in working order, and so on.

Kara’s hand gripped hers a little more tightly, a soft squeeze to remind her. Addy turned her head back, glanced down at Kara, who smiled wanly up at her. Each moment she was under the sun, she was getting better. She could all but see the colour gradually returning to Kara’s cheeks and lips, to the way her strength climbed in notches every couple of seconds.

But she was scared. It was an odd, hollow feeling in her chest. The same one she felt after realizing Taylor was gone.

Maybe Kara noticed, maybe she didn’t, but something made her respond. She squeezed Addy’s hand, so so tight, as tight as she could manage.

“Stronger together,” she mumbled, a crinkle forming between her brows as she worked to keep her eyes open.

What Susan said—Addy had to accept that, didn’t she? She couldn’t fix everything for Kara. She couldn’t stop her from getting hurt, that wasn’t possible, not even remotely viable. But she could do everything in her power to ensure she was there to prevent as much of it as possible.

“Speaking of preparations,” J’onn began, drawing her attention away again. “Before I go, I had intended to reveal this to you sooner, but the president will be making a trip to National City within the next few days.”

The entire room went quiet. Even Kara’s hand went rather slack.

“It’s for her signing of the Alien Amnesty Act. We have a time-frame, here, at most ninety hours to get viable anti-kryptonite technology up and running, and a game plan for her protection. I doubt we can track Metallo down before she arrives, though if we can, we will certainly act on it.” He took a moment to pause, scanning over everyone here. “I know this is neither the time nor the place, but we will need people here, including yourself, Superman.”

“I...” Clark trailed off, reaching up to awkwardly scratch at his chin. “I could stay the extra few days, or at least fly over from Metropolis for her arrival?”

“It would be appreciated,” J’onn said, at last. “Agent Schott, Agent Danvers, you both understand how to work under time constraints. I expect that not to change.”

His eyes turned to the two of them.

“Supergirl, Administrator, you have both been asked personally by the President to be present for her arrival. While exceptions may be made in the event of you needing more recovery time...”

“No! Uh,” Kara jolted, looking much more awake than she had been. She tried to lean up, but her other arm couldn’t hold her weight, and she collapsed with a huff back down into her bedspread, earning a raised eyebrow from J’onn. “No, I can be there. I promise.”

“Good,” J’onn said at last, folding his hands behind his back. “We have to ensure her arrival is as safe as possible, and that means taking precautions. I would ask for any help you can provide, especially with circumstances being as they are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God this fought me. Anyway, next chapter, woo. If you'll notice that Season 2's timeline is already going wonky, that is, uh, both unintentional and not? There's a lot of benefits of having a rough outline for the entire season, sure, but in my case it's not perfect because I'm realizing that a lot of things don't match up temporally/without me adding more chapters. So, instead, the Metallo confrontation gets to get bumped further down the line for a while. I feel like including his takedown in this chapter would a) feel really jarring and b) fuck up my already fragile flow of time.
> 
> Probably no chapter on Thursday, though. Got some medical tests to do and stuff, and the stress is already making it hard to write.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed, anyway!


	37. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets into politics.

What had once been an air traffic control center had gone through some monumental changes to account for the president’s imminent arrival.

Addy shifted back onto the heel of her foot, scanning the room again. They’d kept the computers, terminals, and other things in the enclosed space, but most of them had been covered over by tarps to keep them out of view. In their place, stationary pylons and D.E.O.-issued consoles behaved as replacements, reading off endless strings of text. On one screen, a map of the airfield blinked in and out of focus every few seconds, scanning for signatures. On another, a more conventional radar was scanning air traffic.

The windows didn’t even go unchanged. Some were left open, to turn the area into a functional crow's nest, but the majority had see-through, plastic-like material applied to them. Something Winn had cooked up, as far as Addy had been able to tell; the plastic would reflect a small portion of any radiation that came into contact with it. Not enough to be of much use practically, but enough that if Metallo did come to attack the president today, she’d at least have a fighting chance if he tried to fire on her from the outside.

She wasn’t alone in here either. Eyes turning, Addy let them track towards Susan, who was idly tapping away on one of the consoles in front of her. Susan was her spotter, in theory, though she’d gotten the impression it was more that Susan had become her _minder_ , as it was. Apparently, J’onn wasn’t a fan of agents taking initiative in his agency - not, of course, that Addy could blame him necessarily; the D.E.O. wasn’t exactly a place where renegade behaviour could be encouraged - and had removed her from the strike team, one which was currently on standby not far away.

Over the last three days, Addy had spent most of her time - when she wasn’t working, anyway - helping prepare for the president’s arrival. Of course, she was of the opinion the president had every right to call _off_ the visit to National City, considering her condemnation of what was now a heavily-armed, xenophobic, largely genocidal secretive cabal of highly-trained alien hunters, but for one reason or another, she hadn’t. Something about not bowing to terrorists, if she was remembering the press briefing right.

Eyes tracking back towards the window, she spared a look down onto the crowd below. It was a small-ish group of people, all things considered, but not necessarily _surprisingly_ small. Due to ongoing terror threats and Metallo very much still being off-the-radar, they’d limited the crowd size, not to mention that not many people wanted to get between the president and a cybernetic with the ability to generate radioactive energy blasts.

Well, not many _normal_ people, in any event.

Even Kara was down there, currently chatting amicably with a girl of about nine or ten years old, holding up a sign absolutely _covered_ in glitter, with an ‘I <3 THE PRESIDENT’ written in thick, blocky letters. The only reason Addy _wasn’t_ was one of the agreements she’d made with J’onn: stay out of the line of fire.

She might not like it, but she _could_ understand the logistics behind it. Best to not have her turn into a hostage, in the event that Metallo got an idea or already knew about her more severe weakness to kryptonite in general.

“ _We have confirmation of Airforce 1 inbound,”_ J’onn’s voice was smooth over the radio, a surprisingly high-quality transmission for something very ostensibly a small HAM radio. “ _Five minutes estimate. Sound off._ ”

Turning her head towards Susan, she shared a nod with her.

“ _Squad 1, in position_ ,” came the first, followed by about four or five other squads confirming their status, location, and leadership, among other densely-packed codewords. You could never be too safe with telepathy being a very real occurrence in the universe, after all. It only took one weak link, and your entire operation was compromised.

Addy stepped off to the side, arriving at the Trombusan rifle they’d left on the table. Hefting it without much strain, she began wandering back to the opening in the window, going back over basic tests on the rifle despite having done them no less than five minutes ago.

“ _Superman, in position_ ,” Clark’s voice followed up. He’d flown back in from Metropolis after spending some - purportedly, if Kara was to be believed - much-needed time away from National City. As it would happen, Metropolis wasn’t exactly a place you could leave alone for too long without someone setting something on fire, and the city had been struggling to maintain order without Superman there.

Which, well, was worrying. Addy would have to look into policies and enforcement protocol for National City sometime in the future, just to make sure something similar didn’t happen here.

Halting her movement just next to the open window, she fit the rifle into position, easing her false hand beneath the barrel while the stock rested firmly against the space below her shoulder. She flicked one of the barrel switches, prompting the scope to pop out from within, magnifying the sight of the crowd down below.

“Administrator and company, in position,” she said into her earpiece, finding it to be her turn in the sound-off. That had been _another_ layer of security, a specific order to when each person was supposed to speak up. She thought it was a bit cumbersome, especially because it still wouldn’t account for someone being completely compromised, as you had to know _when_ to talk, but J’onn had made it clear he wouldn’t budge on information security measures.

Not that he should in most cases. She just thought this one was somewhat stupid.

From the corner of her eye, Addy watched Kara nod towards the girl before stepping away from the crowd, bringing one hand up to her ear.

“ _Supergirl, in position_ ,” Kara’s voice called out, just as smooth as the rest.

“ _All clear, then_ ,” J’onn confirmed, voice commanding, without any room for insubordination. It was a bit gravelly, but she was fairly certain that was due to a lack of sleep on his part, considering how frequently she’d seen him awake. Actually, did Martians need to sleep? No, questions for later. She had to focus. “ _With that said, Agent Schott, our defences?_ ”

“ _Right!_ ” Winn’s voice blurted into the line, fidgety. “ _Scanners for both promethium - what we divined Metallo’s skeleton to be made out of, thank-you-by-the-way-Super—_ ”

“ _Agent Schott,_ ” J’onn said, a bit tiredly.

“ _Whoops, right. Okay. Scanners for promethium and kryptonite are coming back blank. All kryptonite shielding equipment is currently active, or at least the stuff connected to the greater network, and we have further radiation soakers in the president’s vehicle as necessary. I’m getting all green on everything, sir._ ”

They had, in a short amount of time, reverse engineered - to a certain extent, anyway - the kryptonite shields which Non’s forces had acquired from Fort Rozz. Not to say that Winn had gotten too far, what they’d pulled out of the wreckage of the prison had been half-broken and barely-functional, but it had been enough to at least blunt the severity of kryptonite radiation without also blunting the usefulness of a Kryptonian’s other sensory abilities by just lining everything with lead.

The potential list of threats were few, due to the circumstances. Nobody was entirely sure how much Cadmus had gotten access to in the years since its creation. Being labelled a domestic terror organization that had splintered from the government - something which could _charitably_ be called seditious - they’d scraped what records they could out of the classified cabinets and had found out that not only had Cadmus been avoiding any oversight, but that they had taken to also purging any copied records older than about six months.

What they _did_ know, though, was that Cadmus had gained access to the wreckage before even the military had, and had extracted large amounts of technology before anyone could realize that this wasn’t already sanctioned by the government itself. It had made it clear that Cadmus had intended to break from the government at least before Fort Rozz had crashed, as it probably wouldn’t’ve lasted very long after people started asking questions about that.

That left them with a lot of vague notions of what Cadmus could field. Metallo was one, potentially basic military-level alien weaponry was another. Nobody was entirely sure what they’d taken, because they’d taken things without recording it.

Despite potentially having high-yield alien weaponry and a cyborg capable of, at least when in close proximity, matching a Kryptonian, there had been no sign of anything from Cadmus since the video had been released. No Metallo, not since he’d nearly killed Kara, no abrupt kidnappings, no bomb threats or other classic tactics used by militant insurgent groups.

It was worrying. Addy didn’t like dealing with variables, it was why she was so good at ensuring there weren't any when she was in control of things.

“ _Are we sure he’s going to attack?_ ” Clark asked, though even he sounded a touch unsure with his words. Dubious.

“ _As sure as we can be, Superman_ ,” Winn replied, the distant sound of clacking keys and soft digitized noise playing out in the background. “ _She did condemn them, after all. Not to mention what she’s about to sign, and how Cadmus seems to be the type of organization to prefer to make examples out of people._ ”

Winn was, in Addy’s opinion, doing startling well for what was ostensibly the first big operation that he was leading security and tech duty on. Time constraints had prevented Winn from getting anything even remotely close to experience with similarly-sized operations before the president arrived, and as J’onn had put it, they were just going to have to work with what they had.

That and it probably helped Winn was among the, by her estimate, three, maybe four humans on the planet who could parse enough of Kryptonian tech to get something workable out of it.

“ _Send off a city-wide scan again, Agent Schott_ ,” J’onn requested, sounding a bit tense.

There was nothing for a short moment, Addy taking the time to adjust her line of sight, test for the air current, get her bearings. Firing the rifle wasn’t difficult, but she’d need to make minute calculations in her head to ensure she aimed on-target in the event Metallo arrived. She might not be able to shoot through his skeleton, but nobody said she couldn’t shoot out his tendons, or put a bullet through the skin of his cheek or out the back of his throat.

He had, after all, hurt Kara, and Addy was _very_ good at timing her shots. For all that she might have to say about that bastardized cluster that the Sting shard had somehow stumbled its way into, at least the shards it connected up with had plenty of interesting ideas. Simple ones, certainly, but interesting.

Shame about the, well, main recipient of that shard. She never understood why they liked making people so _obsessed_ with one another. Just get them to kill each other; hatred was much easier, and more importantly, less messy.

“ _Still nothing, sir,_ ” Winn replied over the line, sounding sheepish. “ _No promethium or kryptonite near the sensors we put around the city._ ”

Addy disliked the majority of human emotions. They were, most of the time, unpleasant, and more to the point they tended to creep up on her. Her least favourite was arriving without much warning, that being anticipation. It was somewhere between anxiety and focusing too much, like tunnel vision that made you flinch when the thing you’re focusing on actually did something.

She let her mind drift, if only to distract from it. President Marsdin had been an interesting woman, one who she hadn’t seen since she’d last gone to the White House, and it might be interesting to speak with her again.

Tugging on her power, she felt her coreself stir into gear and default to Taylor’s configuration. California’s climate wasn’t as rife with bugs as somewhere like Australia might be, but there was certainly no lack of them. Little motes of information, information she could process simultaneously, spilled into existence around the landscape. She mapped the landscape around her with them, a topographic map to get her bearings on where their nests were, before sending them off individually and in pairs to tag onto each member of the crowd.

She could feel her solar reserves lagging a bit, even with direct exposure to sunlight, but the drain was only slightly below the amount her body recuperated by just being in the light. She’d get at least a handful of days before it ran her dry, even at the broad radius of about four blocks.

“ _Airforce 1 is visible, I repeat, Airforce 1 is visible._ ”

With everyone tagged down below, Addy adjusted her line of sight with her rifle, drew it up into the sky. True to the person’s words, the growing speck that was the president’s airplane was steadily flying their way, or rather, in the direction of the runway. It was far off yet, another minute or so by her estimate, but at least there wasn’t much in the way of waiting anymore.

She watched the plane as it grew, and grew, and grew, until even the details were viewable without her scope. The plane arrived with fanfare, the crowd below stirring into, at first, muted cheering and clapping before evolving into something more excited as the aircraft’s wheels squealed to a halt on the runway.

From her bugs, there was no odd movement in the crowd. Good, she could keep her focus either on the plane itself or potentially from behind, not that the agents shouldn’t be sweeping that area continuously already.

A truck, peeling away from a hangar, was equipped with a large set of metal stairs. It drove right up to the side of the plane and eased into park not long after, the doors opening to disgorge a small troupe of suit-wearing men while someone still in the truck eased the stairs more officially into place. The men in suits came to a rest near the bottom, hands up near their earpieces as they spoke, likely to whoever was already on the plane.

The red carpet that snaked down the center of the stairs seemed to be a bit overkill, and more to the point counterproductive, in Addy’s opinion, but then she at least approved of a colour other than the plain, eggshell white that they were using on everything else.

There were D.E.O. agents too, hanging back near the hangar with their armoured SUVs and heavy-duty equipment. They looked, a bit comically, out of place, federal agents by another name but not even remotely similar to the aesthetics or practices of the federal branch of the government. That’s what you got when you made an agency this secretive, she supposed.

The crowd below began to cheer, drawing her attention. Eyes scanning up, she caught sight of the plane’s door opening. Two men in black filed out, stepping off to either side of the door, hands at their sides but never too far from the holster Addy could spot on their belts.

She tagged them with bugs, just to be safe.

Then, finally, came the president. She looked as she did when Addy had first seen her, which wasn’t particularly surprising. She was wearing something of a business-suit-dress-thing, like the kind she had seen Cat wear, if just less... _designer_ , or maybe pretty. It was more professional, with less room for shiny buttons that she always liked seeing. Nevertheless, Marsdin step forward, waving politely to the crowd below, which erupted in yet more cheering.

Her guards boxed in her sides, scanning the crowd and the area next to them.

They made it to the fifth step down before, with an abrupt suddenness, twin beams of angry red heat erupted from outside Addy’s line of sight. The crowd’s cheering turned to screams as the beams slammed heavily into one of the guards, whose entire body instantly combusted, flames covering his person as he stumbled and toppled. The remaining guard grabbed the president by the arm, rushing down the stairs.

Addy swivelled, turning her gun with her as Susan ducked back towards the console, and found... nothing.

“The attacker may be invisible,” Addy announced into her earpiece, speaking over the steady growth of loud chatter as the other squads began to respond. She dragged her bugs free from the crowd for the time being, amassing them into a single large swarm and flung it in the direction from where the lasers came from, carpeting as much area as she could.

The crowd’s screams intensified for whatever reason, not that Addy was giving it much thought.

Her bugs skimmed empty air as they flew, passing in roving, thick black clouds as she levelled her gun, checking down the sights.

At once, a small ways away from where her bugs were skirting along the ground, two more projectiles emerged, as though from thin air. They were massive, sun-like orbs, but not like the ones she remembered from Taylor’s experiences with Sundancer. They were plasma, red-orange heat which radiated out from what she could make out as chunks of metal, and they seemingly struggled to keep coherent shape. They wavered, shifted, rippling as they dropped through the air, curving, and landed just next to the nose of the plane.

The resulting explosion was massive, a sheer blast of heat that made even the air control tower shudder. She spotted Kara flitting away, the president and her secret service agent clutched to her chest, narrowly avoiding being completely consumed by the accompanying firestorm.

Airforce 1 was not so lucky, the nose falling away in melted chunks as Clark flew down, breathing a torrent of frozen air into the fire below, to surprisingly little effect.

Adjusting her focus, she flung her bugs towards where she knew the person was. They lurched as one, catching against something that felt like metal and an odd, sandpaper-like material before they were instantly incinerated by the sheer heat alone. She pressed her swarm on, driving them directly into the person, giving her a line on them.

She lurched from her place next to the open window, rushing forward to the opposite side where she’d have a better angle. She lashed one foot out, catching the window in the center and shattering the plexiglass, sending shards tumbling down below. She kicked her leg up onto the windowsill, propped her gun up. She aimed, counted her breath, and pulled the trigger.

The Trombusan rifle kicked hard enough that, had she not been enhanced as she was, her shoulder probably would’ve relocated itself to somewhere near her spine. The raw crack of force was almost deafening, but it hit home regardless. It caught the target in the shoulder, a visible shimmer of light crawling along the figure, giving a vague impression of a silhouette before whatever maintained the invisibility kicked back into gear.

The target, evidently, didn’t like that. Through the constant incineration of her bugs, she could feel the target turn, a rough silhouette of a hand reaching towards something at its belt.

“Susan,” Addy said, already knowing what was about to come.

“Yes?”

The target drew their arm up, back, another miniature sun exploded into being, still gripped in their hand. Addy made a note to remember the fire immunity, or something close to it.

Now to just find out if they were bulletproof.

“Get down.”

The sun launched itself at them, hurling through the air at a breakneck pace. Addy took aim, adjusted for wind speed, and angled her gun at the indistinct figure. She angled it right where she’d hit before, and pulled the trigger.

It hit. The person was a woman, by her account, covered in a power frame of interlocking metal bars and various odd materials. At the place where she’d hit, the metal had clearly been bashed away, though she couldn’t tell from this distance if it had penetrated. The invisibility field that had surrounded them flickered, before an oily sheen began flowing back over them as they staggered, vanishing from sight at about the same time the molten sun she’d thrown at them impacted the side of the building.

Addy was still not particularly used to pain, or sensation in general. It would be hard to accurately describe what the next three seconds felt like, but it was like, in Taylor’s memories, that time she had stood too close to a bonfire for the better part of three hours and had learned the hard way that you could very much still get minor burns like that.

What she felt next, of course, was her back meeting plexiglass on the opposite side of the tower, shattering as she was flung head-over-foot out through it from the impact. She dragged hard on her body’s ability to fly, catching herself in the air as gravity ceased asserting much, if any, force over her, propelling herself in the opposite direction she was flung.

Rocketing forward, gun still in hand, Addy dismissed the bugs back to their hovels and switched over to a more scan-oriented field, focusing on anything more sentient than a dog. She expanded it out, about half the size of her bug control field, trying to pick up on any psychic presences as she flew overhead.

Her field pinged off of the fleeing crowd below, the agents, even Kara, Clark and J’onn, the latter of which was arriving in a car, but her field found nothing in her immediate vicinity. The runway below her was aflame, fire spreading across the asphalt, and she could still see exactly where she had shot the attacker twice by the rings of carbonized bug corpses, but she couldn’t find the attacker.

Streaking forward, even faster, she still had nothing. By the time she reached the end of the runway, more than far enough away that the fire was a distant, if particularly noticeable smear on the environment, she found nothing.

“ _Administrator, we need you down here._ ”

She reached out, harder with her field, felt her solar energy reserves falter under the strain, twisted her field into a different shape to scrape across the landscape and still, there was nothing.

How?

“ _Administrator_ ,” J’onn’s voice tried again, terse. “ _You’re needed._ ”

Breathing in, then out, Addy pulled her psychic field back into her, frustration prickling at the edges of her senses. She pushed it down.

“I’ll be right there.”

* * *

By the time she was putting her feet down on the tarmac, most of the fires were dying out. Clark and Kara worked in unison, trading off using their speed to drag air away from the fire while the other doused it in a continuous torrent of freezing air. Agents, scattered around the area, were helping the wounded away carefully, with ambulances already on sight. She could even spot one of the secret service agents, who had his clothes stripped down to just his underwear, leaving the raw expanse of burnt flesh along his torso visible.

Airforce 1 had not survived the encounter, by Addy’s estimate. Where she’d only seen the nose melt off at the start, there was now about fifty percent of the plane which was slagged at least partially. The parts that weren’t were caked thoroughly in ice, presumably to prevent the fire from passing into any of the fuel lines. The truck that carried the stairs of the plane had melted into itself, almost resembling an anthill in shape.

Off in the distance, a half-dozen D.E.O. armoured vehicles prowled across the concrete, driving in their direction. J’onn, by her estimate, was in one of them.

Without much warning, Kara dropped from the air, landing sharply on the ground next to her. Addy spared her a look, but Kara was a bit busy glancing over her, hesitating a moment before reaching out to smooth some of the hair out of her face.

“I’m fine,” Addy said, for lack of anything better.

“You got hit with a ball of plasma,” Kara reminded, voice jittery.

“I got hit by the explosion that a ball of plasma made on the side of the tower,” she corrected, because it was true.

Kara breathed out, nodding after a moment before reaching a hand up to her ear. “Winn, anything on Metallo?”

“ _Not even a blip_ ,” Winn said, a bit worriedly.

Kara sighed, reaching up with that same hand to comb through her hair with her fingers. Her head turned back, glancing over her pensively. “Did you find anything?”

Addy shook her head. “I shot the attacker twice in the same spot, enough to break through the equipment they were wearing on their body. They were a woman, by body shape, but were fully covered so age is unclear. Their body was hot enough to incinerate my bugs on contact, despite not generating enough heat for them to notice otherwise, and those balls of plasma were actually devices they had on their person, though it is unclear as to how they functioned. Lastly, they have some method to get away, despite me scanning for them over a large area while flying.”

Kara stared at her for a moment.

“Addy!”

Addy turned her head just in time to see Susan, a bit singed, stagger out from around the corner of the building. She smelled somewhat of burning hair, a fact that grew more pronounced as she rushed over, quickly glancing over her person.

“You’re okay?” Susan said, a bit breathless.

Addy blinked. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

For whatever reason, that prompted Susan and Kara to look at one another, something empathetic flashing over their faces.

“Oh, shit, right,” Susan fumbled, reaching into her pocket as she fished out what was, by all accounts, Addy’s phone. A phone that was, every half-second or so, buzzing wildly.

She’d, honestly, almost forgotten she had brought it with her.

Reaching out, Addy took the phone, flipping it over so that the screen stared up at her from her palm. On it, text-after-text from Lena blared across the screen, constantly requesting her status, if she was okay, and so on. Lena only knew she was going to the president’s arrival because she had used it as an excuse to get a day off, one which she had been awarded with ease on account of Lena’s misguided assumption she had nearly gotten herself killed for her.

Flicking through her password, Addy fired off a reply to the effect of _I’m okay_.

_Lena Luthor: You are? Oh, thank god. What took you so long?_

Addy glanced up from her phone, stared at Susan.

“Tell her you’re being interviewed by the police?” Susan hedged. “It’s not untrue.”

Turning her attention back down to her phone, she did just that.

_Addy: I am currently being interviewed by the police. Thank you for being worried, though._

_Lena Luthor: Are they trying to detain you? I have lawyers. You’re only there because I gave you the day off, it’s the least I could do._

_Addy: Why would they detain me?_

_Lena Luthor: For being an associate of myself?_

_Addy: I don’t think your average federal agent knows I am working at L-Corp._

_Lena Luthor: The offer still remains. Contact me ASAP if something goes awry. You don’t deserve that._

Lena could be very, very odd sometimes.

The slow creak of vehicles drawing to a halt grabbed her attention, Addy flitting her gaze up to watch as the vehicles threw their doors open, Alex and J’onn stepping out in unison onto the tarmac. Alex turned back to one of the vehicles and began to loudly bark off orders, motioning as more well-equipped men and women began to fan out around her, arriving at places where the fire had done the most damage. Something that broadly resembled a very small metal detector was traded hands a few times as well.

J’onn, by comparison, was making a straight line for them, his face twisted up in what could be called _palpable_ annoyance.

Another pair of boots touched down just next to her, and she didn’t even have to turn to know who it was.

“I think they knew about the anti-kryptonite tech,” Clark said, in one hand a half-melted chunk of metal that had once been a kryptonite shield.

J’onn, drawing to a halt just in front of them, stared at Clark. His eyes were flinty and hard, but not at him, more at the general situation, by Addy’s estimate. “It would seem so. Are we certain this is Cadmus-related?”

“We can’t be sure,” Alex said, announcing her arrival as she stepped up beside J’onn. She was wearing a full suit, partially armoured if the way it tugged against something beneath her shirt was any indication. “But I’m unsure of who else would target the president at the moment, especially with tech like that.”

That was, all things considered, a rather valid statement. Cadmus had, after all, gotten access to a fair amount of Fort Rozz before they went rogue. If anyone had the tools to do this type of damage, it was probably them.

“But I think we have a bigger problem,” Alex continued, face twisting up a bit grimly. “I’m getting my team to take readings, but even cursory ones mainly point towards the beams being heat vision.”

For a moment, the words didn’t really seem to track among the others. Addy certainly knew the implications of that, but it was only when Clark’s face twisted up in something like horror that it finally clicked.

“Cadmus could have a Kryptonian,” Kara said hoarsely.

“Heat vision is not particularly common in alien species, there’s only a few who have it,” J’onn agreed, shifting so that he could tuck one arm over the other. “Not to mention there are about six Kryptonians unaccounted for who were prisoners on that ship, among which was a VIP by the name of Jindah Kol Rozz. We don’t even know why she was put in there, the records on her are too encrypted for us to break through.”

“Addy, you said you saw the attacker—shot through their armour?” Kara asked.

Every head turned to her, and while she didn’t like the attention, she nodded nonetheless.

“Can you bring us to where it happened?” Alex inquired, glancing interestedly her way.

Not seeing why not, Addy nodded and motioned for them all to follow. The tarmac below her feet splintered oddly as they grew closer to the wreckage of the plane, where the fire had quite literally liquefied the ground and left gasses to bubble up. Still, she passed beyond it nevertheless, away to the part of the tarmac the plane was pointed towards in the first place, where the rings of carbonized bugs still remained, if a bit blown around by the wind.

A closer inspection revealed it did have some debris, what looked to be the melted slag of her first bullet stuck to the concrete a few paces away while what might have been a blood spatter sat on the ground, turned to completely black ash. She honestly couldn’t tell one way or another, but before she could vocalize as much Alex was calling on her team to scrape it down, the various agents filing forward alongside Alex with small glass tubes and evidence baggies.

J’onn approached her from one side, glancing pensively at the scene. “We’ll debrief more back at base, but did anything stand out to you about the fight?”

Addy paused, thought back. Something did, but only just. “They staggered,” she explained, lowering her rifle so that she could lean it against her shoulder. “When I shot them both times, it hit hard enough to make them stagger.”

“Bullets normally can’t, for Kryptonians,” J’onn mused, sounding thoughtful.

“A Kryptonian who would’ve been in Cadmus’ care,” Kara pointed out, her eyes turned to the scene of Alex dropping into a squat as she began to carefully scrape what could be burnt blood from the pavement with a scalpel. “It wouldn’t be surprising if they were keeping them drugged or weakened. It might even explain the armour.”

“It would explain why the armour was so hot, and they were largely unaffected,” Addy agreed. “It burned any bugs which touched it, I imagine very few things could endure being inside of it, unless it’s heavily insulated, which seems possible, if unlikely.”

Though, that itself might explain why they ran off when she finally broke through it. Either way, it wasn’t clear.

“They were also fast enough to move out of my range after I began chasing them,” Addy included, remembering. “Either that or they have some way to hide from me.” Which, frankly, if nobody else had managed yet, she doubted would be the case now.

J’onn remained quiet for the time being, reaching up to rub at his face. “This is a mess,” he said at last. “If this is Cadmus, they know enough about our operations to plan around us deploying anti-kryptonite tech, which means we have a mole or sympathizer. Or, we now have a second, likely alien threat which intends to take the president down.”

“Not to add another problem to your list, but, er,” Susan’s voice, a bit startling in its abrupt appearance, drew everyone’s attention back and around to her. “Danvers? We’ve got a problem.”

Alex, still on her hands and knees, made a groan. “Oh, joy. What now?” The sound of shifting fabric and muttered insults that followed meant that she was probably getting up, but Addy didn’t think it was necessary to check at this point.

“The NCPD,” Susan explained, sounding a touch annoyed. “The science division, specifically.”

Alex grunted as she walked up next to everyone else, glancing Susan’s way, who shrugged idly in response. As a group, she and everyone else began to walk back towards the wreckage where, after turning the corner on a building, Addy could, in fact, see the police cars that had driven up.

At the front of the small group of cops was a woman Addy had seen before. Tanned-skin, dark hair, a loose smirk, wearing a leather jacket, jeans, a tight belt, and boots, the woman she’d seen so often shove her tongue down the throats of various other female aliens who frequented the bar was apparently part of the local police force. Not exactly where she’d’ve thought she would work, but then again Addy didn’t really give much thought to... well, people in general. People who weren’t important, anyway.

Whatever Alex saw that Addy didn’t, though, it clearly set her off. Out of the corner of her eye, she had the pleasure of seeing Alex’s face screw up into a truly mutinous expression before she marched forward with all the patience and ease of a particularly angry bull.

“Hey,” Alex called out, voice sharp as she came to a stop a few short feet away from the other woman. “Who do you think you are, and why are you on my crime scene?”

For whatever reason, Addy was getting the faintest impression of a territorial peacock.

Still, not one to leave Alex ill-defended, Addy paced after her, Kara holding up the rear as J’onn apparently pulled away to watch the ongoing stand-off from a distance.

“Anyone ever tell you, all you feds sound the same?” The woman remarked, shifting onto her heels and letting her smirk draw wide and broad. “It’s like you all saw the same shitty movies at Quantico.”

Alex’s posture tightened, and not subtly either. Her shoulders widened, jaw grit, and annoyance flashed over her face in pulses, fingers flexing at her side. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that Alex didn’t handle disrespect all that well. Or backtalk, for that matter.

“And who, exactly, are you supposed to be?”

The woman grinned like she won a prize. “Detective Maggie Sawyer, NCPD science division.” She held up her badge, and Addy’s eyes tracked to the name. _Huh_. “We handle all cas—”

“It says Margarita,” Addy pointed out, keeping a facade of innocence on her face.

Heads swivelled, but she channelled Taylor for another moment, pretending at ignorance to the feeling of eyes on her.

Margarita - apparently - drolly looked at her, an eyebrow cocked. “I prefer Maggie.” With that established, she jerked her head back towards Alex. “As I was saying, though, we handle all cases involving aliens and the things that go bump in the night.”

Then, she turned her head back towards Addy again. Full focus and attention, in that deeply unpleasant way Addy had come to learn, was called being scrutinized. “Speaking of, you are someone we have wanted to talk to for a while. Mostly to get a baseline. Everyone knows about Kryptonians, we’ve basically written books, but you? Well, how about an interview so we can get some good footprint—”

“No.”

Maggy stared at her, blankly. Her smile strained.

“I was raised to never tell the police anything I am not under orders to actually say,” Addy recited. It was mostly the truth, too, considering Taylor’s memories taught her that doing so generally only resulted in negative outcomes. “That and I am forced to tell you that I have a lot of lawyers.”

Or, well, Lena did. Maybe Lena _was_ right, though. Trusting the police seemed to be a bad decision, regardless of what universe or how full it might be of Empire Eighty-Eight members.

“Well,” Maggie trailed off awkwardly, turning back towards Alex. A bit of her gusto returned, a smile becoming a bit more natural and less forced, but it didn’t have the same force behind it. “We’ll get back to that, I guess.”

“I doubt it.”

Maggie, to her credit, just ignored her. “I showed you mine, fedjacket, show me yours?”

Kara, off to the side, cringed for some inexplicable reason. A full-body cringe too, like she’d just seen something truly awful.

Alex sighed, reaching into her suit pocket to pull out a badge. She flipped it around in her fingers, tucking it behind her back as the material contained within it began to shift, churn, and transform from the D.E.O. format to that of the secret service. After a few seconds, she brought it back up, smiling flatly. “Alex Danvers, secret service. I’m sure you mean _well_ , detective, but this is a _federal_ crime scene. You’re contaminating my evidence.”

“ _I’m_ contaminating it?” Maggie’s smile turned more angry than happy or smug, this time around. She pointed over Alex’s shoulder, heads swivelling to follow, spotting one of the agents idly shoving charred debris into a plastic bag. “Your lackey over there is bagging charred carpet, and crispy limo into the same ziploc. I thought the secret service would pay closer attention to detail.”

A hand came to rest on her shoulder, startling her for the few seconds it took for her to turn her head back and spot J’onn. His brows were tightened, and he was looking both deeply annoyed with the ongoing situation and yet, similarly, also amused. His other hand had come to rest on Kara’s shoulder, and she too was giving him an odd look.

Carefully, he began guiding them away, the ongoing argument between Alex and Maggie Sawyer growing fainter as they gained some distance between them and the shouting match.

“We just got a report in, the president’s back at the D.E.O.,” J’onn explained, once it had become clear they were making their way towards the various armoured vehicles. “It’s about time we actually sat down and talk to her, no?”

Sparing one last look over her shoulder, off to where Alex and Maggie were, again, still arguing, Addy bobbed her head in acquiescence. She was fine with that, Alex could probably beat Maggie up if necessary. She didn’t need to be worried.

* * *

“Welcome to the D.E.O., Madam President.”

The long corridors of the D.E.O. building hadn’t changed, though they were a lot less occupied than they normally might be. As far as she could tell, close to sixty percent of the agency’s forces had been deployed to handle the fallout from the attack on the president, leaving only the reserve and some technical staff.

They were walking in a group, with J’onn and Kara near the front while she stayed behind. President Marsdin walked at the front of the pack, wavy dark hair framing pale, elderly features. She was still in her suit-dress-thing, albeit with some scorched cufflinks.

“I’m surprised,” Marsdin said, glancing his way. “Now that your true identity is known to the world, you don’t live openly as your alien self?”

J’onn glanced at her as they began to descend the staircase into the mission briefing area. He smiled for her, but it was one of those thin smiles that Addy had come to learn meant it wasn’t actually a smile. “I find looking human makes people feel more comfortable,” he dismissed.

“Hopefully, my alien amnesty act will change that,” Marsdin continued, the group filing out into the mission space proper, towards where the long hallway leading towards the drone - and, in Kara’s case, Kryptonian - landing spot was. “For you and everyone else from beyond the stars that have made Earth their home.”

They passed into the hallway next, down beneath the metal catwalk up above. Pillars held them up, situated away from the center of the path, leaving an open space for the D.E.O. agents on-base to stand on either side of them, clearing a path.

“I know the D.E.O.’s mission is to hunt renegade aliens, and currently handle the safe containment of alien technology, but at least part of that mission is going to have to adapt.”

J’onn’s face, stern, visibly tried to smooth itself out, to stop the expression of disbelief and, by Addy’s estimate, genuine frustration that flickered over it.

“You disagree, director?” Marsdin said it casually, without a hidden threat inside, but it was still barbed. She looked at him thinly, lips pressed together.

“I do, Madam President,” J’onn said, a bit gruffly. “There are aliens out there, killers who wouldn’t understand the concept of the very rights you’re offering them. Evil creatures who could take advantage of your goodwill.”

They began walking up the next flight of stairs in silence, the president’s face turned away, thinking.

“Our world hasn’t been kind to you, has it?”

J’onn said nothing as they arrived at the top of the stairwell, some of her aides already passing over from one of the side-corridors, looking towards them curiously.

“I imagine the very same thing was once said about you, _Martian Manhunter_ , but someone gave you the benefit of the doubt. Isn’t it time we pay it forward?”

J’onn merely ducked his head, looking somewhat contemplative, but not much.

“I can think of no better time than the present for that, but first...” Marsdin’s gaze, finally, swung to her. For the first time since they’d last met, the president looked at her, and Addy could almost say she was annoyed. “I require a secure room to speak to Administrator, just for a moment.”

Ah. There it was.

“Addy, _what did you do?_ ” Kara hissed, voice quiet and low.

Addy was, frankly, not inclined to answer that.

“Administrator hasn’t done anything wrong,” Marsdin clarified, which was very true. She hadn’t. Well, if you weren’t following the letter of the law, anyway. “I just wish to speak with her for a moment. Privately.”

J’onn stared at Addy for a long moment, eyes cautious and a bit worried, before he conceded with a nod. He turned, gestured off down the hall, towards one of the doors. “There’s a secure room there, without any surveillance and lined with lead. We will wait for you here.”

“Thank you,” Marsdin said, surprisingly genuinely. Her eyes turned back to her, then nodded. “Please come along, Administrator.”

She wasn’t worried, not like the others, and merely followed. Staffers looked at her awkwardly, and so did the agents, already she could hear the low murmur of whispers and confusion among them. Betting, no doubt, if what Alex said was to be believed, the rank-and-file of the D.E.O. compulsively bet on things, and her fate would be no different.

The room they entered was by all accounts a bland meeting room. A single long table, surrounded by chairs, plain off-white walls, metal floors. Very D.E.O., and as a direct consequence, about as boring as one could meaningfully manage.

She shut the door behind her, watching as the president, with steady steps, took her seat on the opposite end of the table. For a moment, they just stared at one another, one alien to another, before the entire facade dropped, and Marsdin was looking at her, if not coldly, then at least particularly sternly.

“How did you know?”

Stepping forward, Addy arrived at her seat opposite to Marsdin, easing herself down. True to her words to J’onn, she made sure he got his job back by making a plan for the president to read. The majority of it, of course, had been her espousing her belief in J’onn as a person, and his capabilities, as well as his tact and skills. The rest, though, had been mostly blackmail.

It was, after all, not always that a president turned out to be a shapeshifting alien refugee. A Durlan, in particular.

“I read your mind,” she explained, matter-of-factly.

Marsdin’s face twitched, tightened. “There was no record of you coming to the White House outside of that one visit, and by that time you already had your file. Care you explain?”

Addy leaned back, pressing herself into her chair as she stretched her legs out, working some of the twitchiness back down. “Humans are an inventive creature,” she started, thoughtfully. “It’s why I like some of them so much. Sometimes they just understand things, have intelligence beyond what they should be capable of, considering their biology. Winn Schott is among one of those people.”

“The son of Toyman?” Marsdin asked, a bit curious.

Addy nodded. “You know of Kalvar technology, correct?”

Marsdin nodded.

“They had attempted to recreate it on-site, and Winn got it into his head that he could use the technology to give me a more creative costume. I appreciate him a lot, but he also unknowingly did what D.E.O. researchers failed at, and had properly recreated the Kalvar technology in full.” She reached into her pocket, digging her phone out and switching to the modified app she’d finished. A few taps, and with a shimmer the costume parts of her vanished, turning invisible. “I have other adds-on at home that Winn made for more creative liberties that I use to cover up the rest of me. All of this can be connected through ports that behave like velcro.

“I used this to sneak into the White House. I had expected to leverage blackmail in the form of war profiteering, or lobbying groups, or possibly something like it. Maybe some severe xenophobia, or some criminal connections.” Addy turned her gaze fully onto Marsdin, who almost seemed to shrink a little. She blinked, reminded herself to keep her intensity low. “But you were much more interesting than that, after I went through your brain while you slept.”

Marsdin’s character broke, and she _sighed_. A long, tired, exasperated sigh as she reached up to drag her hand down her face. “The only reason why your plan worked, and the only reason there’s not a government-sponsored manhunt for you right now, is because I intended to put J’onn back into this position _anyway_ , and you seemed to be acting out of good intentions.

“But if you go bad, Administrator—Addy, _Queen Administrator_ , whatever you may wish to call yourself—”

“Addy,” Addy corrected.

Marsdin sighed again, shutting her eyes. “ _Addy_ , then. If you ever try to leverage this again, I will step down from office and go public about my identity if it means taking you down is the eventual outcome. I will burn every bridge to ensure you cannot have power over me.”

Well, that was what she thought, anyway. If she needed power over the president, she could just take it. Then again, Kara probably wouldn’t be impressed with her.

“Are we clear?”

Addy refocused, smiling at the president. “I like your response,” she said. It was true, too, because that was a very solid response to being blackmailed. Other than the initial decision to, you know, do what she wanted anyway. “So, yes, I understand.” 

* * *

“Okay, what was that about?”

Addy turned her gaze away from Marsdin, where she was being escorted out of the D.E.O. headquarters alongside her staffers, J’onn waving them off.

“National security.”

Kara just looked at her, but clearly realized the futility in trying to get any information out of this. “Alright, fine.”

The main doors to the area flung themselves open as Alex and her team swarmed in, finally returning from their jobs. There were a fair few agents who looked embarrassed, though the majority of them were busy maneuvering a few ragged chunks of metal with odd pockmarks towards the evidence and research storage.

J’onn, above, peeled away from where he’d been watching the president go, climbing down the stairs in two as Alex, frustratedly, waited for him.

“Agent Danvers?”

Alex sighed, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “We confirmed it. The heat scattering from the initial attack was heat vision, and the plasma balls were some type of modified broken sun grenade.”

“Those aren’t easy to get,” J’onn said, a bit tersely. “They’re not exactly legal, unless that has changed since I’ve let Mars.”

“It was the same when I was on Krypton, the debate around broken sun grenades, I mean. Banned there too.” Kara explained, sounding a bit lost in her own head for a moment.

Reaching around, Alex propped her suitcase up on one of the main tables, flipping it open. Inside were samples and a few gadgets. “Heat vision isn’t unheard of, but neither is it common.”

“It’s found among at least five species I know of,” J’onn explained, approaching Alex’s side, reaching in to pick one of the gadgets out and turn it on. Whatever he read on the screen wasn’t good, if his expression was anything to go by. “But three of them don’t apply due to none of them being humanoid.”

“Which leaves us with two,” Alex continued, in his stead. “Infernians, and... Kryptonians.”

“Speaking of Kryptonians,” Kara interrupted. “Where’s my cou—er, Superman?”

“Back in Metropolis,” Alex explained, not looking away from the samples. “He told us to keep him updated as things progress, and also that he’s sorry he didn’t get a chance to say bye before he had to go back.”

“Regardless,” J’onn interrupted. “We’re fairly certain this is Cadmus’ doing. They may not have claimed the attack yet, but they haven’t claimed any of the attacks we know they’ve been involved with in the past. There’s a very real possibility that they have a Kryptonian, or at least something close to it.”

“That gives us leads, at least,” Kara said, after another few moments of silence. “An Infernian will be harder to find, but Kryptonians? There’s not many of us, and we know of at least a few people who might’ve dabbled in that, and what we might have to look for.”

Maxwell Lord came to mind. It certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him to create something under duress, especially considering that’s what the D.E.O. more or less did to him. It would be flagrantly hypocritical for him to do so after claiming he was done with weapons, but then she hardly expected much out of him.

There were other leads too. Cadmus having a Kryptonian felt like something that wouldn’t go unmentioned or unnoticed. Or at least there’d have to be something that they could use to ascertain it one way or another.

“All that said,” J’onn started, passing the gadget back into the briefcase. “We need a game plan.”

“There’s no time like the present,” Alex said.

They got to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, got this out. Hope you enjoyed, sorry if any of it is vague and blurry again, this week has been exhausting for me and it's taken a lot to write things. Either way, enjoy.


	38. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes sleuthing.

Breakfast was a rather more crowded affair, this morning.

Across from her, in her usual seat, Kara was busy demolishing a tower of pancakes, the somewhat unpleasant scent of cooked batter reaching her, even from here. A little ways next to her, in a change of pace, was Alex, whose breakfast plans had gone much less pleasantly, leaving her with a small cluster of withered, half-blackened strips of bacon and an egg so overcooked the yolk seemed to have the same consistency as chalk dust.

For her own breakfast, Addy had fallen back on a rather more conventional and favoured choice: crunchy granola, interspersed with dried berries, and some yogurt. The yogurt had been Kara’s idea, or _suggestion_ may be a better word; even if there had been very little she could do to dissuade her - despite showing very real information that as far as she could tell the nutrition of milk was mostly a lie to peddle America’s excess stores of it - from pushing the issue.

Nevertheless, she was managing.

Alex had stayed over after they’d come back from the D.E.O., opting to spend half the night - if the various times Addy had intermittently woken to the sound of tapping keys and muttered curses - on her laptop, presumably managing things related to the attempt on the president’s life. The consequences of _that_ decision, for the record, could be clearly seen in the burnt food and three discarded Red Bull cans she had spotted in the trash bin during a late-night trip to the bathroom.

Despite all of her misgivings about Alex’s increasingly worrisome reliance on an unregulated stimulant and her stubborn habit of intentionally giving herself insomnia, she was surprisingly at ease for all of this. In the background, turned so low she could barely hear it, the news was playing, a perpetual drone of some newscaster she paid not a care to - as she was not, in fact, that ginger lady she’d seen that one time - going over the attempt on the president’s life. Altogether, the combination of quiet munching, Kara and Alex’s presence, and the television gave the entire situation a... what would Taylor have called it?

Homely?

Yes, she was going to go with homely. It gave it all a very _homely_ feeling.

A feeling that was helped in no small part by the fact that she had no obligations today, or for the rest of the week for that matter. Following Lena’s misunderstanding that she had in some way come under fire by the police - a fact she had, with great effort, refuted - Lena had decided to give the rest of the research team the remainder of the week off, as the labs would be operational by the time their ‘break’ was over. Now, to be quite honest, Addy didn’t entirely _agree_ with that decision, especially because the rest of the team frankly had no clue she had been _at_ the president’s arrival until Lena had informed them, and therefore weren’t feeling anxious until that very moment, but still, what was done was done.

It did, thankfully, allow her a degree of agency in the proceeding investigation. Unlike Kara, who worked with and was surrounded by people who could likely cover for her in the event of a superhero-related emergency, Addy, between her already existing distance from doing things such as regular patrols or handling petty crime - something she wasn’t even going to consider, she had _much_ better things to do with her time - and the fact that nobody in her new job knew that she had powers was generally incapable of responding to immediate issues.

Not today, however. If anything, she was going to be doing more than Kara was expected to.

Alex, across from her, finished her last desiccated stick of pork meat with a bit of a grimace, no doubt flagging a bit against the taste of carbonized bacon. Why exactly she forced herself to eat it in the first place was another thing she neither understood nor particularly wanted to, but she was just going to chalk it up to Alex being a notoriously stubborn person at this point.

Kara, by comparison, was very much enjoying her pancakes, using one hand to maneuver a fork between the pile and her mouth while her other tapped away on her phone. Every once and a while she’d nearly smear a piece of pancake against her cheek and have to course-correct with a touch of super speed, giving the entire display a bit of a surreal edge.

“So, are you ready to meet Maxwell Lord?”

Turning her head away from Kara and towards Alex, Addy inclined her head in a nod. Her eyes flicked back down to her bowl of granola, barely a quarter of the way from being empty. She didn’t really feel like eating much more, especially after putting away all that yogurt, but people would probably make a big deal out of it if she didn’t. “It certainly would be convenient if he turned out to be the cause of all of this.”

For more than one reason, really.

Dragging another spoonful of granola to her mouth, Addy resigned herself to finishing the rest of it, packing one crunchy-chewy bite away after another. It wasn’t the _worst_ texture, but neither was it comparable to carrots. Or celery. It had less snap to it, and was as a consequence flatter, sensation wise. Not good, not bad, just... _bland_. Like the textural equivalent of oatmeal, or off-white walls.

“I’m sorry I can’t go with either of you,” Kara piped up, showing some rather big improvements by the fact that she had opted to swallow before speaking this time around. Maybe her persistent corrections _were_ making some improvements? She’d keep a note of it. “Snapper Carr is forcing me to be the one to interview Lena about the Alien Amnesty Act, and I won’t get a chance within the next week unless I go today.”

Shaking her head, she dutifully swallowed down the crumble, trying not to smack her lips. “It’s fine,” she rebuked, because—well, it _was_. The simple fact of the matter was that while she may dislike Maxwell Lord, he was, to whatever ends, little else _but_ Maxwell Lord, and that meant he wasn’t much of a threat, not an active one in any event.

“Mh,” Kara hummed out, sounding rather noncommittal. “It’s... different without you and Winn there. It’s starting to set in for me, I guess? James and Lucy are around, and they’re both so _nice_ , but it just isn’t really the same without either of you. I mean, it’s okay, no pressure to come back to work with us or anything, but, y’know.”

“You know,” Alex began, sounding almost ponderous. “I remember you saying the same thing when I went off to university and you were stuck at high school.”

Kara flushed, poking at her food a bit mindlessly. “Yeah, well... what’s it like for you at the D.E.O.? You don’t talk about it much.”

That, for a second, almost seemed to bring Alex up short. Addy watched her from across the table for a moment as Alex’s face cycled through a handful of small, minuscule expressions, adjustments to her resting face that only gave faint clues as to what she was thinking, none of which she could really figure out just at a glance.

“It’s... _work_ ,” Alex began, speaking as though she was testing out the sound of the last word, like she wasn’t completely sure if that was the best way to phrase it. “There’s a bit of a cultural divide, back from when J’onn took over. A lot of the people who were around when Hank Henshaw actually ran the division were exactly the sorts of people who’d join the D.E.O. for what it says on the tin: detaining aliens.”

Kara made a face at that, somewhere between a scowl and discomfort. “They’re just allowed to remain there?”

“Until they screw up somehow,” Alex confirmed. “Not little screw-ups, but like, big breaches of protocol. The rest of us—most of us, now that I think about it, we don’t really see it the same way they do. They think of themselves as like, alien hunters, we see ourselves as enforcers? Or something like it. It’s just a different cultural divide, and it’s why things are so tense now.”

There was a pause as Alex, again, clearly took some time to try to find a way to phrase her words.

“There are some people there who would support Cadmus, and _did_ support Cadmus when the D.E.O. was sending them over to be experimented on,” Alex said very, very carefully, almost hesitantly. “But it’s not really obvious if they’re still supporting Cadmus as-is and are just pretending not to, or if they’ve really changed heart now that Cadmus has involved itself in attacking humans rather than aliens.”

“That sounds like a problem,” Kara pointed out.

Alex reached up to comb her fingers through her hair, a small sigh leaving her mouth. “It is, we might’ve shut down _one_ mole, but there’s a list of people who could be the next one. We can’t just fire them either, as most of them have classified information and that might just encourage people on the fence to hop sides anyway.” She shook her head, easing her hair out and letting her hand fall to her side. “But that’s _my_ problem, and J’onn’s, and not entirely relevant. What about you, Addy, how’s your job been?”

Addy blinked, suddenly under scrutiny. She finished off her last spoonful of granola, crunching thoughtfully as she traced back over the NDAs she had been obligated to sign, among other things. Swallowing, she shrugged. “Good. We’re currently working on a project which is related to energy manipulation, and it may lead to ways to disarm energy-based weaponry if deployed properly.”

Alex looked inquisitively at her, lips turning up. “I’m more of a xenobiologist myself, but if you _do_ ever happen to end up out of a job, I could look into research team positions for you at the D.E.O., considering you’ve got the experience now.”

“No thanks,” she replied glibly.

That gave Alex a jolt, if nothing else. “Can I ask why?”

Wasn’t the answer obvious? “The D.E.O.’s aesthetic sense is tremendously ugly.”

Kara devolved into a rabid coughing fit, smacking her chest.

* * *

The plastic wrapping around the car seat crinkled with each smooth movement it made, much to Addy’s continued horror. Why, exactly, someone absolutely needed to cover every last inch of a car’s interior - already made bland and unappealing by its uniform black colour scheme - with the equivalent to thick saran wrap was beyond her, but at this point, after roughly thirty-five minutes of driving, she was starting to think it was to torture the inhabitants.

The only problem with that theory was that Alex kept choosing this car, of all cars, to use.

Downtown National City was a bustling place at most times of the day, but especially so during noon. Civilians crawled in large packs up and down the sidewalk, while cars whizzed and whipped past, only barely ceding ground to the traffic lights and other indicators that dotted the streets. Tall, tower-like buildings filled the downtown without restraint, leaving everything feeling haphazardly tall, with nary a single-story house in sight if you got deep enough into it.

And deep into it they had to be.

LordTech’s main building was not unique among the throng of other glassy towers. It was, by all estimates, utterly _average_ , with reflective windows and a height that matched most of its competitors, but lost out to buildings such as the L-Corp building and CatCo, not that either of them were too close to the LordTech building on its own.

All of that said, though, there were artistic differences. Where the other towers tended to be more modern-looking, with more of an emphasis on steel and glass, the LordTech building, at least near the very base, sprawled out into a white-stone, rather ostentatious looking thing that hinted at the building styles of antiquity, but didn’t entirely commit to it. It was a style of architecture one could find in government buildings that didn’t have the funds to match Washington’s style, but hadn’t been willing to go full brown brick, and had instead come to a compromise that left everyone feeling faintly disappointed.

Alex, white-knuckling the steering wheel despite moving at a sedate two miles-per-hour in a parking lot, eased the car into a turn, pulling the tall sight of the tower out of her immediate field of vision as she slotted the vehicle between one large jeep and a comically undersized smart car.

For a few seconds, they merely idled there, the car not in park and Alex visibly trying to pry her own fingers from the wheel, if to little actual effect.

“Are you okay?”

Alex turned to look at her silently, then glanced back towards the wheel. As though her words had been all that was needed, her hands finally managed to pull themselves free of the black-leather wheel, if not entirely relax, leaving both of them almost claw-like. “I _really_ don’t want to have to see him again,” she said at last, sounding profoundly uncomfortable.

Which, actually, did raise a question. “How do you know Maxwell Lord?” She’d been under the assumption there was _some_ history there, as Maxwell seemed to play some lip-service to Alex that he generally didn’t for everyone else besides Kara and herself.

Sighing, Alex reached forward, twisting the gear shift into park before twisting the keys out of the ignition. “Back before we found you? I had to do some reconnaissance on Maxwell himself, and he asked me out to dinner.”

Addy made a face, one which Alex clearly caught, if the way she threw her hands up was any indication.

“I _know_! Okay? I get that he’s... Maxwell, but it was for a mission, and I sure didn’t enjoy it, and he even used it to _bug Kara’s apartment_. It was awful, and it doesn’t help that he’s like an ill omen. Every time he’s involved with something, it’s inevitably going to go bad.”

She didn’t need many examples, either. Addy had gotten some information on Bizarro, and had been there for what the red kryptonite had done to Kara.

“His experiments tend to have catastrophic results, don’t they?” Addy confirmed, reaching down to pop her seatbelt, letting it reel back in towards the door.

Alex did the same, nodding along. “Yeah, that and he’s just, _slimy_ , you know? Sure, we haven’t had even a peep on him since he made that reveal that he was stepping away from weapon’s manufacturing, but that still doesn’t really bode well.”

Addy waited until Alex popped her door first, which took a few seconds as she first had to gather her tall paper cup of coffee out from one of the holders beforehand. Nevertheless, she followed her out and into the somewhat stale, if salt-infused air of National City, air which was a bit more chokingly hot than the interior of the car. Not that it bothered her too much, but when she turned around to check on Alex, easing the door shut with her prosthetic arm, she saw her cringe visibly away from the sun, as though it might burn her, and take a swig of a cup of coffee that had been left to cool for the last twenty minutes.

It took exactly three seconds for Alex to process that fact, and from the way her face twisted as if she’d bitten into a lemon, it probably wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience. Still, stubbornness prevailed, and Addy stood around, letting herself get mildly cooked by the Californian sun, as Alex drained the remainder of the cup with a gritted jaw.

Finally, her lips broke their seal to the rim. She shuffled back a bit, brought the keys up, and pressed a button on the little remote that came with it, the car’s trunk clattering open as she walked around the exterior towards it. Following her slowly, Addy peeked her head around the corner, catching sight of exactly what the trunk was full of.

Which was weapons. Well, that and gear, by her estimate. A bullet-proof vest, several rifles, what looked like small-yield munitions, several handguns, and a few other tools she didn’t have a name for.

Alex, to her credit, didn’t miss a beat. She reached inside, plucking a D.E.O.-issued badge from within and pinning it to the collar of her black shirt before taking a small knife and slipping it into a holster on her left hip, while what appeared to be a 9mm pistol was holstered onto her right. She reached up, shut the trunk with a grunt, and locked the entire car down with a press of a button on a remote attached to a keychain, the car bleating out a loud honk as all the locks simultaneously popped up to indicate they were active.

Turning towards her, Alex smiled thinly. “You ready to go?”

Addy nodded.

With that established, Alex led the both of them out from the parking lot, passing over the flat expanse of concrete that surrounded the building. More and more of the building’s design became clearer as they neared the front entrance, where sharp, thin panels of glass contrasted against the more blocky style of white stone that framed it. She personally didn’t think it worked - it wasn’t adventurous enough, in her opinion - but it certainly set itself apart from the steel highrises and brick facade.

The front doors to the building were automatic, peeling apart soundlessly, with a blast of chilled air hitting her in the face as they stepped through.

The interior of LordTech’s main building, as the trend had established, was unlike L-Corp or even CatCo. Where L-Corp preferred the sleek, hitech stylings of futurism, with glass panels, touch-screens, waxed stone floors, and a lot of metal, LordTech took a more strongly antiquated approach. White stone was the prevailing theme, to nobody’s surprise, with benches built from it, cradling velvety cushions. The ceiling was a mosaic of various patterns, and the doors were all thick and wooden, with gleaming white door knobs.

There were certainly _signs_ of technology. The front desk was outfitted with a large number of computers, and there were wall-mounted televisions around every corner, but it was not trying to be, at the same time. It wouldn’t look that different with all of the technology stripped away, when the same almost certainly could not be said for places like L-Corp, where if you took the technology away you may very well end up without someplace to sit.

The other thing that stuck out to her was the security. There was, in her opinion, no such thing as _too much_ security, unless it was hampering the person it was securing, but even she could acknowledge having an armed guard situated in every nook and cranny was, bluntly, unusual. She counted off at least sixteen guards, and that was just the ones she could see; who knows how many she might find, if she flicked her powers on.

A tug on her sleeve drew her attention back down to Alex, who was looking a bit drolly at her.

“It’s ugly,” she commented, plainly. Not completely, but the religious adherence to white stone had left the place feeling sterile when, in a building that actually understood a style like Art Deco, it would be awash with textures and colour gradients. It felt unfinished, like a statue from antiquity whose paint had been stripped away by time and exposure.

Alex merely rolled her eyes, stepping forward and into the crowd, leading Addy to follow. Stepping between bodies, out of the range of touch, and keeping mostly to the middle of the long main floor, they made it to the receptionist in good time, without there even being a line to stop them.

The woman manning the front desk was tiny, a little under five foot by Addy’s estimate, with olive skin, thick wavy black hair, and a sharp, narrow chin. Her eyes, flicking towards them as they came to a stop at the foot of the desk, were so dark it was hard to tell her pupil apart from it. “Can I help you?” She asked politely.

Alex tugged on the badge on her chest, drawing the secretary’s gaze, her eyes widening minutely. “Alex Danvers, with the federal government. I and my associate have an appointment with Maxwell Lord in fifteen minutes?”

The woman’s eyes dropped down to her computer, and her hands played across the keys in a fast pitter-pat of clacks. After a few more moments, she nodded. “Alex Danvers and Adeline Queen, right here. I’ll get your passes, just a moment.”

A little ways away from her monitor, a familiar device - one she’d seen down at L-Corp, actually - began whirring and shuddering, slowly spitting out one visitor’s pass after another. The woman took them each time they came out, waving them back and forth in the air a few times before checking both the front and back.

When the card landed in her hand, it was still warm.

Leaning around the back of her chair, the woman pointed off towards the other end of the building, where Addy could just spot elevators peeking above the crowded throng. “You’ll be going to the top floor and there’ll be terminals up there to lead you through signing in. I hope you enjoy your stay at LordTech.”

Alex glanced back towards her, then towards the elevator, and promptly did not respond to the woman’s politeness with a comment. Addy, however, being the more polite member of the group, bobbed her head in a thankful, if silent nod, before rushing over to catch up with Alex, who was determinedly marching a line through the crowd, people moving out of her way.

Once they arrived at the elevators - the buttons already pushed by the handful of people waiting around - there wasn’t much else to do but wait. Addy kept her eyes on Alex, just watching, making sure she was okay. She got that Alex was a strong person, both in body and in sheer willpower, but she was a bit more skittish than usual today. A bit more uncomfortable about being in this place. She could understand that, to a point, and knew that trying to get Alex to stop tensing would only highlight the issue and undoubtedly lead to more of it.

Finally, after roughly twenty-six seconds of awkward, stilted silence - and Addy _counted_ , so she knew it was right - a pair of elevators opened at once, disgorging a number of people. The ones waiting around all shuffled into the right, chattering on between one-another; colleagues, by her estimate, leaving the left one completely empty. Alex, correctly, chose the left one as the better option, and Addy merely followed along, glancing over the almost ceramic-white interior.

Sincerely, she was starting to wonder if Maxwell was okay. Nobody should like white this much.

Alex jabbed the top floor button and pulled back, leaning against the back wall of the elevator with her arms crossed over her chest. The elevator lurched, doors shuttering, and then began to ascend.

Addy glanced up, staring blankly at the very, very obvious camera located in the top right corner of the enclosed space.

There was always a balance when it came to interactions, Addy had learned. It was why she and Kara could engage with one another so easily and without much friction. Kara was very outgoing, but highly respectful of other people’s boundaries and limits. She could be quiet if she needed to be, but would otherwise try to offer background commentary, even just to fill in the silence.

Alex, arms across her chest as if she was trying to tightly hug herself, was the opposite. Alex was like Addy, she was fairly certain, in that they both liked _thinking_ , and preferred some amount of silence, if not total silence. The problem was that Addy wasn’t a huge fan of vocalizing her thoughts, as they tended to be what Kara called ‘rude’, and had started to curate what she spoke about. Which meant there wasn’t a _lot_ to talk about, especially without anything interesting to grab her attention.

This left them in a conversational limbo, something that she thought should be illegal. Awkward silences were awful, and she had long since learned to empathize with all the things Taylor had done to avoid them. On more than one occasion, especially considering her living circumstances after joining the Wards, that had involved bugs.

Addy was fairly certain she couldn’t find any highly venomous insects to break up a silence at this point, though. Maybe she should’ve planned for that when outside?

She’d consider it, next time. That or she might try for another species of animals—insects were just particularly space-efficient.

Before she might have to resort to avian dive-bombing, the elevator doors peeled open and Alex was out of them before Addy even really had the chance to respond to them. From behind, she watched as Alex’s demeanour started to change, and again, she was starkly reminded of Taylor.

Her host hadn’t really ever noticed it, after a point, but once she joined the Wards she had started to more severely separate her civilian existence from her cape one. A bit of a moot point, considering she was effectively on probation at all times and didn’t really have much of a secret identity afterwards, but it had reflected in her posture. When Taylor had been outside and taking some of her free time - a rarity in the first place - she’d taken to changing up her posture, little cues that separated her from Weaver. Taylor in her civilian clothes had still retained some of the confidence, but it had been subdued, only enough to make people think twice before accosting her.

A similar change overtook Alex, in bits and pieces. Each step she took made her next more steady, her shoulders pulling back just the slightest amount while her back straightened into a rod. She stepped out of the generally uncomfortable posture of _Alex_ , as it was, and into the confident and partially dangerous posture of _Agent Danvers_ , to make a metaphor out of it.

The top floor they’d been let out into wasn’t much different from the main floor. It was wide and open, with more of those benches spaced around, though the ones up here had been elongated into something closer to a couch. There weren’t any other people here, not even a secretary, the desk left empty for all but a pair of touch screens with card slots just below. The walls were covered in a mixture of posters - some dating all the way back to the early 80s, to her surprise, she hadn’t been aware that this company had existed that long - and shelves displaying awards or representations of accolades.

The roof above was glass, letting the sun beam in, though it was unfortunately freckled with a spatter of bird droppings, something that was only to be expected, really.

Arriving at the desk, she watched Alex pull up beside her and start tapping away on the touch screen. Turning to hers, she did the same, navigating through the options, confirming her appointment, and then feeding her card into the opening when it requested it. A few seconds later and an image depicting an upturned thumb was provided, along with a small note to sit down and wait until someone came to collect them for the meeting.

Not seeing anything else better to do, Addy found herself a set and dropped down into it. Alex took up the other end of the bench to her, giving enough distance to be comfortable, but still remaining in proximity to her. From the way Alex kept checking her, glancing at her furtively, that was possibly a conscious choice.

Addy gave her a smile, one of the ones she’d been practicing, and Alex relented, slumping a bit back into her seat with a huff of breath.

“This is a lot of theatrics just to meet him,” Alex muttered, her heel starting up in a percussive rhythm against the floor. “It wasn’t nearly as hard last time.”

Addy opted not to respond to that, nor point out that ulterior motives could have encouraged him to cut corners on his security choices. That and a date didn’t seem equivalent to a meeting, though she could see where one might get mixed up.

Against her expectations, though, Maxwell Lord did not leave them waiting for fifteen minutes. Instead, after merely three or four had elapsed, and Alex’s tapping had since shifted to clattering out the beat of what Addy was fairly certain was the bohemian rhapsody, the door at the far end of the room buzzed and then pushed itself open.

Maxwell Lord’s head peeked around the corner, catching on them almost immediately.

It would not be too dramatic to say Maxwell had changed in the time since she’d last seen him. He’d grown his beard out a little, and it became clear why he hadn’t in the first place. Gray hairs dominated the majority of the sides of his chin, transitioning into something darker as the beard wrapped around his jaw line and connected back up with the thick, wavy mess of black hair that crowned his head. He looked a bit healthier, too, by her estimate, eating more often, with a bit more life to his face.

As he stepped fully out into the area, keeping the door held open with one hand while the other, wrapped in bandages, hung at his side, she took him in fully. He was still wearing the same style of clothing she’d seen him in, but he’d filled it out a bit more, had more meat on his bones. For whatever reason, it almost irked her that he was in better health than he had been during the Myriad incident, though she didn’t quite let herself fall victim to pettiness, rising to her feet in sync with Alex instead and keeping her thoughts to herself.

As Maxwell took her in, by comparison, his face went over a surprising number of expressions. At first, eyes trained on her arm, he looked almost relieved, a little happy, before they flicked back up to her face, then to Alex, and resignation clouded over the more clear emotions he was experiencing. She itched to dig into his head a little, just to find out what he was quite so invested in, but discarded that thought for now. She’d be doing that anyway, she could circle back around.

“I suppose this was an inevitability,” Maxwell said, his voice echoing a bit as it carried across the open room.

As they got closer, Maxwell eased the door open even further, gesturing with his wounded hand as Alex reached out to take it from him, the man slipping back into the long hallway behind him.

Not missing a beat, Alex stared daggers at him. “So you admit you’re involved with the attack on the president?”

Passing in through the threshold, Addy listened as the door swung shut behind them, clattering.

Carpet paved the way to the far other end of the hallway, though little else changed. The walls were still painfully white and bland, with the occasional window, and the ceiling had taken up the mosaic appearance it had on the floor below.

Maxwell shot the two of them a look over his shoulder. “Do you think I’m mad? Of _course_ I didn’t do that, I’m quite faithful to my country, I’ll have you know.”

“Cadmus probably thinks the same thing,” Alex pointed out, scowling.

Leaving the hallway, Addy wasn’t sure what she expected in terms of Maxwell’s office, but it certainly wasn’t this. White stone had been blessedly cast away, replaced by dark wood panelling and floors. Mahogany furniture dotted the large area, with a library’s worth of shelves full of both books and other oddities.

What really stuck out, though, was how personal it was. Cat Grant’s office had held some of her accolades, certainly, and her signature bowl of M&Ms, but she hadn’t really put much of herself into it. Lena Luthor had been much the same, possibly even more severe, as Addy had never been able to make heads or tails of whether or not some of the bizarre sculptures were of any relevance to Lena herself, or if they were just there to fill space.

Maxwell Lord was playing a different game than the rest of them. His office felt very much like his; she could see pictures of a younger-looking Maxwell Lord, some as young as a child, some with adults, others without. A graduation picture, framed above his desk, showed him standing rather alone for but two or three other people, among which was an oddly familiar bald man. She only knew it was a graduation picture from the fact that he was wearing one of those stupid-looking hats and a robe.

The light the windows let in was enough to keep everything illuminated, but it wasn’t so bright that it was painful. It was clearly carefully designed, and probably very, very expensive.

But at least it was pretty.

Maxwell strode easily, walking around to the other end of his desk and depositing himself down in the dark leather chair, which creaked under his weight. He sighed, folding his hands together atop his desk, and looked towards them both. “So, I assume the interrogation is to begin, then?” He smiled, and the word _slimy_ once again came to mind. “I’ll be on my _best_ behaviour.”

Alex just looked towards her, inclining her head. The cue.

Addy dragged her focus back towards her power, growing the embers as her field expanded out around her. Another slight adjustment, blocking out the slight feedback she got from Alex, and she was ready to access the human mind, rather than insects.

“No,” Alex said, slowly. “We’ve had problems with you leaving out pertinent information before, Lord. We can’t take that chance again, not with the president’s life on the line.”

It seemed to click for the man what was about to happen, his face being drawn on hard lines. His eyes flicked towards her, nervous. “I’m not sure, Agent Danvers, Adeline, that I would consent to have my mind read again. I’ll have you know, it was quite the unpleasant experience the first time around.”

Addy paced forward, just the few feet she needed to get him in her range.

“Consent has never played a part in anything you did, Maxwell,” Alex said tiredly. “Why would it now?”

He opened his mouth to say something in response.

Addy reached inside, not bothering to wait to listen to what it might be.

* * *

Maxwell’s mind was a carefully organized thing. She could tell that much, even from a cursory brush over his psyche, and it wasn’t exactly unusual for people to have ordered minds. They tended to evolve out of people who were very patterned, orderly, with a lot of habits. OCD, and disorders like it, tended to make it more severe, where the pattern was something she might have to figure out on her own, as its context and system were only things the person beholden to them really understood.

Pushing a metaphysical hand through the outer barrier of his awareness, she dragged up the most obvious memories, pulling them to the surface. A firing of neurons followed, sharp bursts of pain receptors and emotions related to shock and surprise catching against her order as the first hints of memory splayed themselves across the shared consciousness she had just established.

Mind reading was not her specialty, just something she had derived, and it was why it was never so... _subtle_ as it could be.

_Maxwell felt, perhaps against his own better judgement, excitement. Adeline looked better than she had during Myriad, though telling her state apart from the amount of soot she had been buried in had been next to impossible. The arm he’d helped design looked good on her, fit well, and for the first time in what felt like months, he felt something begin to settle. Guilt, he was sure, shame, especially, but something else he could_ —

Unrelated. She swatted the memory away, shoved it down, and pulsed in a request for information on the president, trying to draw up connected memories, thoughts. A few milliseconds passed without much in the way of a response, before the resulting torrent of thoughts came bubbling up, easily graspable.

_Was this what the JFK assassination had been like? He wondered, watching as the president was hauled away by Supergirl, the news cast showing the better half of Airforce 1 go up in a blast of flame. Shock sat heavily at the front of his head, and it even took him a few moments to recollect himself, to think. He already had an idea about who_ —

Good. She grabbed the later end of that memory, narrowing down her search. A tug, a question, _who did you think attacked the president?_

_Maxwell stared at the note on his desk, the letter discarded next to it. The seal across the front of the page was unfamiliar, so was the name: Cadmus. They wanted him, apparently, to join them—to bring his expertise into use for, what, some black-ops government group?_

_No. He wadded the page up, breathing out through his nose. He was done with the military, with guns, with all of that; he wanted a clean slate, he wanted to build, not destroy—_

She wasn’t given a chance to dive deeper before one memory spilled over into another.

_“I’m not sure you realize what you’re doing, Mr. Lord.”_

_Maxwell stared out across the city below him, a mess of lights that lit up in long, spiralling patterns. The sky above was so polluted with light that he could only barely make out two-dozen stars, even from his prodigious height in his office._

_“No,” he said, at last. “I think I know exactly what I’m doing.”_

_“You turned down our offer.”_

_“And? I’m a free citizen.”_

_“The military is pulling out of contracts, Mr. Lord. Anti-alien tech had been among some of the most lucrative and advanced technology the military was able to get its hands on, but between yourself and L-Corp deciding to vow not to build any more of it? Faith is shaken.”_

_He rolled his eyes. “Let it be.”_

_There was only silence on the other end of the line. It took him another five seconds before he realized they’d hung up on him_ —

Another memory. She grabbed at it.

_Well, at least they were being less subtle. The letter he’d received this time around hadn’t tried to coax him into doing things by praise, they did not sing his accomplishments. It was a simple thing, with an address listed at the bottom and a line of text:_

_Join us, or perish._

_It burned just as easily as the first one did—_

The knotted memories had led her in deep, down into the core memory centers. She felt it, then, a sizeable knot of context and information, all leading back to all of those incidents, those thoughts. It was fresh, raw, tinged by trauma and fear, a heady cocktail by anyone’s estimate. Regardless, she accessed it, pulling it up instead of letting it merely flicker in and out of context, drawing herself down fully into the vision.

_The waste disposal treatment center was going well. Not up to the theorized maximum, certainly, but it was new technology, and as with most pioneered technology, it was slow to get started. Thumbing through the first few pages of the report, he arrived at the commentary section. People, however, were hopeful; the waste disposal center was intended to handle the sort of waste that can’t, meaningfully, be contained without high risk. The sort of stuff that leaches into a water table and turns the groundwater toxic for a few hundred years._

_Sure, it wasn’t the radioactive material storage he intended it to become, not yet, but this was promising._

_There was a soft knock, startling him from his page. His eyes flicked up, towards his door, and he ran through his schedule, eyes tracking towards the clock. Nobody was supposed to be up here, they had somehow bypassed his secretary, accessing the security hallway. They had a protocol for how to contact him if they had an emergency or a question, and that involved a pager._

_Shakily, his hand tracked beneath his desk, thumb dragging over a switch to inform his security detail. His other hand went for a drawer, pulling it open and retrieving the gun from inside. Keeping it below the lip of his desk, he took in a breath, then let it out._

_“It’s open.”_

_The door creaked open, and the people who stepped through he both knew intimately. The first was a face he’d only seen on the television, but had branded into his memory, if only to keep himself safe. It was Metallo, the same face, the same posture, albeit cloaked in a heavy-looking set of robes. Possibly some way to hide the radioactive kryptonite signal from people looking for it, if he was to guess._

_The other person he knew much, much more personally. Lillian Luthor had aged with grace, or perhaps like a poison. She was just as beautiful as she had been when he’d first seen her, barely 13 and hanging around with Lex, but she was much older. The lines of her face had become much deeper, and her eyes were calculating and so, so much colder._

_She reminded him of Lex, and not in a good way._

_Not bothering to hide it, he propped his gun up against the surface of the table._

_Lillian’s smile drew itself out, crawling across her face in a mockery of good humour. It neither reached her eyes nor particularly felt much like an actual smile, it was too flat for that._

_Maxwell felt himself swallow, thick and hard._

_“Put the gun down, child,” she said, nodding towards Metallo, who swung the door shut behind her._

_“I’d rather not,” he rebuked, offering her his very own plasticky smile. “All things considered, especially with me wondering what you did to my secretary.”_

_Lillian rolled her eyes, glancing towards the window. “I dealt with the help, don’t worry.”_

_“Will I need to schedule a funeral? She was quite the worker, I’ll definitely miss her.” For more than just that, though. She’d been a nice person, one of the few people to at least pretend to hide what she thought about him._

_“No, but she may need a few weeks of recovery.”_

_He felt something inside of him settle. He was going to give that woman a raise, and probably a shrink. God knows, she was likely going to need it._

_“You turned away our overtures,” Lillian began, stepping a few more paces forward, Metallo shadowing her. “Many of them polite, even. I had hoped you shared our sentiment on the alien problem our world is currently enduring, especially considering your friendship with Lex. I did love to watch the two of you bumble around, Lena chasing your heels at our summer house.”_

_Lillian was like that, in a lot of ways. Hiding malice and cruelty beneath attempted motherhood. The problem was, by Maxwell’s estimate, that she had never learned how to be a mother. A taskmaster? Certainly. A matron? Perhaps. But motherhood had never come easy to her, and while that normally wouldn’t’ve been a problem, it didn’t need to come easy to anyone, she had turned her frustration with it onto her children._

_Strict rules, extreme punishments, abuse in anything but name. It was never physical, but emotional; she liked crafting people into images, sometimes of herself, sometimes of others. Turning people into tools as a pastime was what had made her so wealthy in the first place, and what had made Lionel Luthor fall in love with her, by his estimate._

_“But no, since you are behaving like a child, I will treat you like one.” Lillian turned the brunt of her attention to him, eyes tracking down from where they had been pinned to the graduation photo above his desk. “I’m here to make you an offer, Maxwell. You tell me how to make kryptonite, how to make more of it, or make it for us yourself, and I won’t have you buried in a construction lot.”_

_Maxwell gripped his gun tighter, ran his thumb against the hidden dial. He couldn’t hear it, but he could feel it clicking up, the hilt warming in his palm._

_Lillian’s face darkened at his silence._

_Just as suddenly as she arrived, the doors behind Metallo and Lillian exploded open in a flurry of movement. His security detail ripped through, screaming orders, telling Lillian and Metallo to get down, to put their hands up. Things that wouldn’t stop a beast with a kryptonite core in his chest._

_But they didn’t need to._

_Pulling the trigger, energy leapt from the barrel and arced across the air, slamming into Metallo’s chest. The man screamed, crumpling back as the discharge flowed into his skeleton, sending him to the ground as he twitched, spasmed._

_Lillian grabbed something from her pocket, stepping over Metallo to get out of the way of a grabbing soldier._

_“We’ll be in touch,” she less said, more spat, and then slammed her thumb down. There was a blaze of light, like looking directly into a magnesium fire, and by the time the black spots around his vision faded, both Lillian and Metallo were gone._

_The gun dropped from his hand not a second later, the pain hitting him in the chest. He crumpled forward, wheezing, glancing at his hand and then promptly very much away as it became clear that was at least a second-degree burn, if not worse._

_He was going to have to recalibrate that_ —

* * *

Addy blinked away the half-faded memories, glancing towards Maxwell. The man in question was hunched over, clutching his head with his one good hand, a low and hoarse noise leaving his mouth.

“So?” Alex asked, glancing curiously at her.

Addy shook her head. “He’s been propositioned by Cadmus repeatedly, but he fought off Metallo with a gun he’s made. It’s located in his third-lowest drawer, and shoots I believe electricity compressed into a beam. It’s why his hand is injured. He’s not involved with this. I do know who appears to be managing Cadmus, however: a woman by the name of Lillian Luthor. They also know he can create kryptonite, though I am unsure if that was leaked from the D.E.O. or from his own internal staff.”

Alex’s face tightened as a thin, harsh sigh slipped past her lips. “Wonderful, we had our suspicions but...”

Movement out of the corner of her eye drew her focus back to Maxwell, who had finally decided to rejoin the conversation, a pained scowl stretched across his face. “I now have a migraine,” he said with great care, wincing as each word left his lips. “Are you happy?”

Addy nodded, because he had asked.

“Well,” Alex cut in, stepping forward. “I’d be happier if you could give us any other information you may have on Cadmus, such as whoever might’ve ratted you out.”

Maxwell sighed, rubbing at his temple with his bad hand. For a moment, he did nothing, before with yet more care, he leaned down, yanked a drawer open, and hauled a notebook out. With a bit more force than might be necessary, he slapped the notebook down onto the desk.”

Alex stepped forward, closing the distance between herself and the desk, and took the notebook in one hand. She started paging through it, lips pursed.

“A list of every name and associate involved with the Bizarro project _and_ the kryptonite project, with special notice for the ones who dropped off the face of the earth during the takeover attempt that shortly followed my initial incarceration. Please pay a fair amount of attention to Dr. Aleksandir, he has his own section, but he was the one most involved with Adeline’s creation.”

There was a note of silence as Alex paged through the remainder of the notebook at breakneck speed. After a few more seconds, she nodded, closing it. “Thank you for your time.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” Maxwell groused, wincing as the sun passed out from behind a few clouds and cast the entire office in a bit of a glare. “But if you really want to show your appreciation, next time just _ask_ me.”

“You’ll get talking privileges when we can be sure you’re not about to do something stupid like make kryptonite again,” Alex cut in, sharp, harsh. There was no small amount of enmity in her tone, fists balled up at her sides.

After all, Addy hadn’t been the only one affected by the red kryptonite. Alex had been too. It had been bad, even for Alex.

Maxwell sighed, reaching up with one lazy hand, and with very little decorum, waved them both off. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go and swallow an entire bottle of Advil.”

Alex just turned to her, ignoring Maxwell’s comment. “Tell me more about what you saw?”

Addy nodded, and did just that.

* * *

The D.E.O. mission room was awash with agents, at least a hundred of them milling around, talking in low tones. The area was currently being used as a major staging ground, with the screens that usually tracked civilian reports of aliens replaced by a near-endless list of locations, groups and people. Some on the list were grayed out, while others were red or white, respectively.

J’onn was standing where he normally was—that being directly in front of the screens, barking orders to the various agents who cycled in and out of his immediate vicinity.

Scanning across the room, it wasn’t hard to find Kara. What was a bit hard was seeing how she was. Kara was tucked away in a chair, her cape thrown over the back and her face a touch downcast with lip bit tightly. She was looking at her phone, tapping the screen slowly, before shaking her head and rapidly tapping, repeating the process every once and a while.

Alex glanced towards her, then towards Kara. “Can you go check on her? I have to touch base with J’onn.”

Addy nodded, watching Alex march towards J’onn, agents making a path for her, and embarked on her own journey. She wandered down the side of the area, keeping away from the thickest regions of the crowd, and emerged not too far away from where Kara was seated.

It took until she was about five feet away for Kara to notice her, her head jolting up, eyes catching hers before sweeping away instinctually. She dropped her phone in a fumble, placing it face-down on the table next to her, and tried to push a smile to her face. It was about as fake as the one she’d seen in Maxwell’s memories.

“You might—” Kara began, glancing around for any eavesdroppers. When she found none, she refocused wholly on her. “You might need to quit your job.”

...What.

Evidently, the interview had _not_ gone to plan. If anything, it seemed to have gone horribly, especially from the way Kara’s face kept cycling through frustration and hurt, and her teeth continued to drive themselves into her lower lip, which stubbornly did not give out to the strength of a Kryptonian bite force.

“Why?” Addy tried, pushing away on her thoughts of Kara’s behavioural tics.

For a moment, Kara said nothing, pursing her lips more tightly, curling deeper into herself. “Well,” she started, slowly. “I was, uh, I went to interview Lena, right? I wasn’t _expecting_ anything, because this was for work, and Lena seemed like such a good person.

“But then, Lena just—she showed me this _device_. This thumb scanner, maybe about the size of a remote? It could tell a human apart from an alien, and uh, she didn’t, really get why that was a bad idea. In this political climate, with Cadmus around, you know? She wanted to mass-produce it.”

Addy’s mind reeled for a moment, running through her thoughts. She _did_ know, because that sounded like an extraordinarily bad decision to make when the current most feared terror organization was an anti-alien one.

“I tried to explain to her, you know, that this would... put aliens on the spot, right? It would put anyone who didn’t want to be scanned in a suspicious light, as refusing to take one was basically admitting you’re an alien, not to even talk about what it would do to _aliens_ , and—and we got into this _argument_. She didn’t get it, and I blew my top, and...”

Kara trailed off, bringing her hands forward to rake through her hair. “I’m sorry Addy,” she murmured, almost hoarse. “It wasn’t—I wish... I wish it would be better, but if she tries to implement that you can’t work there. She’ll find out, it’s too risky.”

Addy nodded, slowly, haltingly. “I think I should speak with her,” she said, finding her words. She’d do that, double-check, and then come to a decision.

Kara twitched, snapping her head around. She opened her mouth to say something, but Addy was already shaking her head.

“No, I think I need to, okay?”

After a moment, Kara just nodded, letting out a soft sigh. “Alright.”

Finding the seat next to Kara, Addy eased herself down into it, eyes tracking towards one of the exits as another group of agents began to file in. At their head was Susan, who was shaking her head towards J’onn, who himself had just finished up speaking with Alex. He turned to the screens behind him, leaning down to tap a few keys on the keyboard as another five or six items on the list grayed out, and two others were changed from white to red.

Finally, he turned back around and brought his hands together in a powerful, sharp _clap_. The room quieted in an instant, a hundred heads turning in his direction.

“We now have a strong basis for what we know of the current possible suspects!” He called out, stepping forward until he was nearly at the edge of the raised platform. “First: our normal suspects for the broken sun grenades, such as the Ak-Thun Syndicate, Black Federation, and R.E.P. are _not_ active as of this time. It would appear that we’ve mostly cleared out the stores of broken sun grenades they were hiding on earth to try to avoid intergalactic laws against them.”

The crowd murmured at those words, and J’onn patiently waited for it to abate.

“Second: a cursory look over the alien communities we are in regular contact with has revealed very little, other than rumours of people going missing and abductions. It is nearly impossible to confirm or validate these claims in the timeframe we have, as aliens are regularly targeted in the first place. It is however something we should keep in mind.

“Third: Cadmus now remains the only suspect we know of who is powerful enough to draw out that much firepower. It’s as simple as that, there are no longer any alien communities that could reasonably acquire and fund the technology we saw on hand. But we do have a good explanation for why we are seeing them.

“Despite it not being entirely clear as to whether or not it’s an Infernian or Kryptonian, at this point we do not have a way to ascertain which, due to the matter we scraped up being too carbonized to divine any source to it. We have a match on the armour, a set of what’s known as core power armour—capable of both generating _and_ containing heat, and coincidentally among some of the things that were stored on Fort Rozz as of its crash, along with the broken sun grenades. These armaments were apparently acquired from pirate fleets before Fort Rozz was transported into the Phantom Zone for further protection.

“Currently, we’re going to have to be working from the presumption that our unknown enemy is heavily armed and within the threat range of a Kryptonian. What does that mean, agents?”

Susan, in the crowd, raised her hand. “Maximum force and minimal hesitation, sir.”

J’onn nodded solemnly. “We refer to adversarial aliens on a level similar to Kryptonians as _unmovable threats_ ; they may have singular weaknesses, or specific ways to put them down, but conventional munitions are only going to throw them around, and after a point will do little to actually meaningfully damage them. In a situation such as this, where our goal is the death or containment of our target, we cannot hesitate, nor come unprepared. We will need _every_ chance to take them down.”

The crowd murmured again, low and uncomfortable. Turning her head to the side, Addy spotted Kara, biting her lip even harder, looking almost pale.

“Uh, guys, we might have another problem.”

Addy tilted her head back around, catching sight of Winn. He had peeked half of his body in through the opening into the meeting room, and was clutching one of his laptops to his chest, looking a bit frazzled.

“We got a call in for a burning warehouse in the industrial district? It’s uhm, not going out, and might be related to the attacker.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” J’onn asked, voice carrying over the crowd despite no longer speaking in that forceful tone of voice he used whenever he was addressing the rank-and-file of the D.E.O.

Winn flipped the laptop around, ambling towards J’onn. From where she was, she couldn’t make out what was on the screen, but from the way J’onn’s brows pulled in tight, forming a wrinkle between them, it was probably bad. “The fire crawls over things unnaturally and water just... isn’t cutting it. The warehouse was also a squatting ground for the homeless since LordTech emptied it about a month ago? It’s uh, mostly homeless _aliens_ , as far as I can tell.”

For a moment, nobody said anything or did anything. Then, the entire room erupted in chatter; there hadn’t been _any_ sightings of the attacker since the attack on the president. They had, much like Metallo, vanished into the ether, and unlike Metallo, there was no good way to track somebody like that. They weren’t exactly radioactive, after all.

“Agents!” J’onn barked, cutting through the chatter. “I want teams one through three getting geared up, fire protection equipment should be prepared for those who need it in the changing area! Get a move on!”

The room started moving in unison, some pulling away from where the lockers were situated while others swarmed into it. From within the crowd, writhing as it was, Alex emerged, jogging up to them, her attention wholly on Addy. “Do you have your suit on you?”

Addy shook her head.

“Then you’ll have to come with us in the van—I want you to do sweeps over the area just to make sure, okay?”

Addy blinked. “The van?”

Alex nodded rapidly, making her way around to her side of the table, gesturing for her to get up. Addy glanced back towards Kara, who was already making her way towards J’onn, likely to ask about her place in the plan.

“C’mon!” Alex said, almost barked at her. She wasn’t used to being commanded by Alex, and wasn’t sure if she appreciated it, but kept her mouth shut.

* * *

The less said about the drive over, the better.

Addy would never, not in her life, enjoy being shoved into the back of a cramped van, surrounded by people in full military gear, where the single unifying colour was matte black. Neither, she should point out, would she enjoy the feeling of being boxed in by two too many people in her personal space, regardless of whether or not Alex might be one of them.

Suffice to say, she was out of the van as soon as it had crawled to a halt.

The scene outside of the van painted somewhat a better picture as to why J’onn had rallied the forces so quickly. The warehouse, or what was left of it, was consumed in a blaze, but in a way that was distinctly not how fire normally _worked_. The flame clustered together, collected into almost a dense carpet of orange-red as it quite literally ate through metal and steel as though it was wood. A direct consequence of this was that whatever chemical reaction was supporting the fire created a thick haze of smoke with a faint greenish tint, something that was unlikely to be particularly healthy to inhale in close proximity.

Not, of course, that it had stopped the first responders. Fire sirens wailed from a cluster of cherry-red fire trucks, with two rows of five firefighters supporting one another as they applied liberal use of their hoses. Water raced through the air from one side, nearly a sheet from the combined force of five at once, and met the fire with little actual effect. If she looked close enough, she could see the fire waver ever-so-slightly against the torrent, but what was perhaps more visually disquieting was that the water didn’t stick around. It didn’t slip back down the walls in torrid sheets, but rather vaporized, turning into steam which joined the smoke up above, giving the sky a grayish, hazy hue.

Kara had been there well before they’d arrived, and even she was struggling against it. Within the clouds of smoke and steam, Addy could just barely spot the reds and blues of her costume as she dived in and out, her movement always accompanied by a following blast of force and air. Wherever Kara went, the gust she blew out that followed left behind sheets of ice in its wake, ice that was, unfortunately, little effect against the fire as it didn’t take much time for the fire to crawl onto the _ice itself_ and begin burning that, too, somehow.

The concrete expanse surrounding the warehouse was occupied by others as well. Onlookers, forming a loose crowd near the perimeter, watched on in what Addy was observing as a mix of horror and discomfort. Emergency responders, with their ambulances, had set up a small recovery area, where she could already see a few aliens, many of which were humanoid, certainly, but set apart for the blues and oranges that tended to dapple their skin and the occasional horn or tusk that protruded from their face.

Every once and awhile, through the entrance of the warehouse, either a firefighter would enter or leave, sometimes with an alien they had rescued, more often without one. They always came out with soot-streaked clothes, heavy masks fogged over by black smudges, and their uniforms turned colourless and grayscale from the smog.

Around her, Addy watched as the D.E.O. agents began to take rank. From behind, she could hear the crunching of gravel as the other two vans creaked to a park and deployed their accompanying team. They fanned out around her, forming a loose arrow, and though most of them were wearing protection equipment for their face, making it difficult to pick out any emotions, just from the way they stood and where their hands rested - conspicuously next to side-arms - she had no doubt that they were uneasy.

The aliens, by the look of it, weren’t terribly relaxed around them either. Skittish eyes flicked back and forth between the amassing collection of black-clad agents, and Addy was very briefly reminded of what J’onn had said. Rumours of aliens being abducted, going missing—it would hardly be a stretch of one’s imagination to think they might be thinking something like that was about to happen.

A hand touched her shoulder, gentle, and Addy managed to restrain a jolt. She turned her head, finding Alex looking at her with some curiosity, if not too much intensity.

“Scan the area for us?”

Right. That’s why she had been brought along. Addy drew her power back up, pushed it into action as her field spread out tremulously around her. Little motes of information, of raw data, collected across the new sense she’d made for herself as she picked up on signatures in the area. A lot of agents, a fair number of aliens, humans—but, as far as she could tell, nobody who was responsible. It was hard to differentiate who did or didn’t carry a certain amount of intent for this, the bare emotions she was picking up on were muted and distant at best, but one way or another, she was fairly certain they were gone.

She shook her head to indicate as much, Alex breathing out an annoyed, if not exactly surprised sigh.

Alex stepped forward, past her, and then past her agents. She raised one hand up, palm facing forward. “We will not be arresting any aliens today! We are here to ensure they are _safe_. Teams one and two, fan out and look for possible firestarters; team three, remain here and be on guard. We think the perpetrator is gone, but we can’t be sure.”

The following chorus of agreements crackled over the earpiece Alex had forced on her no less than five minutes ago, a dull roar of conversation as the teams dispersed and spread out.

Alex turned back to her, then. “I think we should check up with the wounded, see if anyone knows anything?”

Addy cast her eyes towards Kara, who was finally beginning to make some progress by working with the firefighters. They’d rigged up a system where they were spraying their hoses high into the air, and Kara was blasting all the water vapour accordingly downwards with powerful, extremely cold blasts of air, effectively smothering it beneath layer-after-layer of snow-like ice. Fires still sometimes ate their way out from beneath it, but the blaze was beginning to be tamed.

Finally turning her attention back onto Alex, she nodded.

The walk over to the impromptu aid station was short. The aid station itself was made from three separate ambulances arranged in just such a way that their open backs were generally pointing towards one another. In the space between them, stretchers had been laid down against the ground to act as seating or beds while paramedics worked without stopping. The majority of the people there were aliens, clearly enough, and most of them were injured. Most of them had burns, she was fairly certain, though burns seemed to appear differently depending on the species—one toad-like humanoid had burns which had since inflated into something like a blister, whereas an older woman, already treated, had leathery patches barely visible from beneath bandages, raised and inflamed by the looks of it.

Alex approached the woman, rather than anyone else, halting just a few paces away, and the woman, accordingly, turned her head in Alex’s direction.

The woman herself might be able to pass as human in the right light, but beneath the heavy glare of the sun, her nature was particularly obvious. Her skin shimmered slightly, giving away the fact that it wasn’t the smooth expanse that humans had, but rather a very intricate grid of tiny scale-like growths the shape of hexagons. Her body hair was baby-fine, even on her eyebrows, with its colour being a bluish shade of black that framed both above each of her eyes and filled out her head with long, straight hair, some of which had been singed away. Her skin was as pale as Addy’s was, but with a different tint; it wasn’t pinkish, but rather closer to having a purple undertone. Her face looked, otherwise, fairly human, if defined by wrinkles around her eyes and between her nose and mouth.

The woman blinked slowly at the two of them, irises a pale blue. “Can I help you?” she asked, after another moment, drawing a bit inwards as her eyes flicked down to Alex’s badge, then towards the agents in the area around them.

Alex smiled a bit weakly, fingers twitching at her side. “I’m here to just ask a few questions, if that’s alright?”

The woman hesitated for another moment, lips pursing as her eyes narrowed. “Am I under arrest?”

“Not unless you set the fire,” Alex said, more than a little sharply.

The frown that crawled across the woman’s face only added to her age, if anything. It made the wrinkles deeper, the lines starker. “Of course I didn’t—why would I? That was my _home_ , my things were in there, and now they’re gone.”

Alex’s face softened at that, lost the stubborn edge to it. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice still professional. “But if you want for us to capture who set this fire, you need to give us something to go from.”

Addy rather suddenly found herself at the end of the woman’s stare, inquisitive as it scanned over her clothing choice. She did, as the last bastion of good stylistic sense, stand out among the throng of faceless, black-clad secret operatives, but whatever she was looking for, it seemed to settle her.

The woman sighed, leaning back a bit and wincing minutely as her bandaged shoulder came to rest against the ambulance behind her. “The community here—we’ve only been in this place for a month. It was cleared out, and we always are on the lookout for new shelters, as homeless ones either refuse to take us in or outright call the police on you. Other homeless people do, too, if the staff don’t. We... we were in the middle of a prayer, it’s, ah, you wouldn’t know it, but there are some inter-species religions out there. Not many, but you can find them in places like Starhaven or other port stations. Either way, we were praying for, well, things to go well.”

Alex nodded along, motioning for her to continue.

“Someone arrived, we heard the door open, but we couldn’t _see_ anyone. Not even Ida, who can usually see most things. We thought they were coming in, the time for that prayer is important, and most in there either knew of it or had converted in their journey to earth. Whoever arrived left behind these flaming footprints, it seemed like they were looking for something but, well, they didn’t find it.” The woman’s face twisted, eyes growing distant. “When they didn’t, they started to attack us—or, well, not us. They attacked the warehouse, firing beams into the walls, touching things to set them on fire. They drove us out of the warehouse, and... into a series of black vans.”

Alex’s face twitched. “Do you know the make and model, perhaps?”

The woman looked at her, a bit blandly. “I do not know your brands—Nokia is one of them, though?”

“That’s a cellphone company,” Addy informed her, rather helpfully.

That earned both of them a shrug. “Then no, I do not know, but they were different from yours. Boxier, same colour, but different. Either way, I was still inside—my species, we are nearly immune to fire, even this type of fire. I hung back with some of the younglings, shielded them, but the ones who ran outside were mobbed by men in black armour, such as the ones you brought, and dragged away into the cars, kicking and screaming. They drove off with at least half of us, if not more, I—”

“Hold on a second,” Alex interrupted, sounding rather confused. “What do you mean by _this type of fire_?”

The woman blinked, stared at Alex. “Infernian fire,” she explained, slowly. “It’s telekinetically enhanced, it behaves differently. More corrosive than... what is the word, _burny_?”

That, at least, struck a Kryptonian off of the list. Which was a good thing, especially because there weren’t exactly too many heat-beam-using, invisible aliens in the city. “Do you think she was wearing armour?” Addy asked, just to clarify.

“That or heavy boots,” the woman informed, again not sounding terribly sure of herself. “Nobody tried to attack them, we just ran. We know better than that.”

Alex opened her mouth to say something, but was rather immediately interrupted.

“Katna!” A familiar voice bellowed, the rush of footsteps ringing in Addy’s ears as she turned. “You’re okay!”

Maggie Sawyer, appearing from behind one of the ambulances, rushed forward and down, catching the woman in a tight hug. For a moment, Katna - apparently - did nothing, freezing, before her arms came to wrap in turn around Maggie’s body. A tight squeeze followed, only stopping when Katna patted Maggie’s back a few times, the detective drawing away.

Leaning down, Maggie checked over the bandages, clicking her tongue noisily as she caught sight of each and every one of them.

“Of course, Officer Sawyer,” Katna said, at last, sounding a bit more relieved. “Do you think some fire can take me and my own down? No. I am fine, but the others—they are not. I was just telling these two as much.”

That, at least, brought attention back to them. Maggie swivelled in a heartbeat, looking a little startled that she hadn’t noticed them beforehand. Her eyes narrowed in on Alex, and then immediately dropped to her badge. She looked towards Addy next, to her arm, her hair, her face, then back again.

A few seconds passed, and Addy was fairly certain the woman had just figured out something she probably shouldn’t’ve.

“You’re not secret service at all, huh?” Maggie said, at last, staring pointedly at Alex’s badge. “Holy fuck.”

““Language,”” Addy found herself saying, in sync, with Katna.

With a sudden gout of force and the clatter of heels, Kara landed next to her. “The fire’s done, but a lot of the interior was destroyed, and what wasn’t is buried under melted slag. I’m sorry I couldn’t help any more than that.”

Katna looked at Kara for a moment, scanned over the bits of soot on her costume, the look on her face, and then sighed. “Just... _please_ find the ones they took, would you?” She began, sounding a touch horrified. “Please, there were—there were _younglings_ there, not my own, but of my kind, at least. They came to this place for safety, and I couldn’t stop any of this. My kind is _resistant_ , yes, to many things, we have our reputation for surviving in places many others may not, but we are not strong. Not like you. So please, please find them.”

Kara was nodding along, rapid-fire, before the woman had even finished. Her face was hard, harder than Addy had really seen it in a while, but her eyes were kind. “I promise to find them, one way or another.”

“Can you give me some space, Danvers?” Maggie cut in, Kara jolting violently at the name, even if it was clearly pointed at Alex. “I need to talk with Katna, get more details on this, so if you’ll _let me_ do my job—”

Alex, for once, relented. Her hands came up, and with a truly sympathetic look, she just nodded. “Got it, I’ll go reconvene with my team, see if we know anything about this. Do you mind sharing any details you get?”

Maggie’s mouth opened, if without any sound coming out of it. She glanced at Katna, who just wordlessly nodded. “Fine, we’ll talk in ten. Give us some space, otherwise.”

Kara tugged on the sleeve of her shirt, guiding her away from the ambulances. She wandered back through the crowd, watching off to the side as firefighters entered the now mostly-inert warehouse with axes and other tools, hacking away at fallen or melted debris as they made their way deeper in. Some aliens, unwounded by the looks of it, kept to the outskirts of the warehouse, not entering in after them, but watching, perhaps hoping that they might have something that survived in there.

Addy doubted it, though. Fire which ate through metal doesn’t play nicely with much of anything.

Speaking of playing nicely, though. Addy drew away from Kara for a moment, watching as she wandered off to go and talk to Alex, and pulled her phone from her pocket. Tapping over to Lena’s contact, she started typing.

_Addy: I believe I need to speak with you._

For a moment, there wasn’t any reply, though the text went from ‘sent’ to ‘read’ the second she sent it. Glancing around, she wandered over towards the back of one of the vans she travelled in, dropping herself into a sit against the rear bumper.

Her phone buzzed.

_Lena Luthor: I will be free for the next hour and a half. After that, we may have to convene after work hours. Are you able to meet me now?_

Peeking back around the side of the van, Addy glanced at Kara and Alex, the latter of which had been visited by Maggie, talking animatedly between them. Kara, glancing back her way as if she noticed, caught her gaze and waved.

Addy beckoned her over with a motion of her hand.

“Addy?” Kara asked, once she had gotten close enough.

“I am going to meet Lena now,” she said, matter-of-factly. Kara’s face cramped at that, but she bit her lower lip to contain whatever she was about to say. “Would that be fine?”

Slowly, with great reluctance, she nodded. “Yeah, Alex is uh, talking with Detective Sawyer over there. Something about a bar to look for clues and show Alex what alien culture is really like?”

Ah, she probably meant Al’s. “Hopefully she tells her not to draw her gun,” she added, glancing back down at her phone.

“Wait, what do you mean?”

_Addy: That will be fine. I will be over soon._

“Addy, for the love of _Rao_ , what do you—”

“Alien bar,” she supplied, watching as Lena replied with a confirmation text before shoving the device away in her pocket. She would probably have to take a taxi or a bus, seeing as she didn’t have her costume, and Kara had been very strict about no publicly flying when she was in her civilian clothes, despite the relative efficiency it would provide for her daily commute. “They tend to get twitchy around guns.”

Kara just stared at her for a few moments, mouth gaped a little. “...Right, okay,” she said at last, rubbing at the crease between her brows. “You’re going to make me go gray soon.”

“You don’t age,” Addy pointed out, instead.

Kara mumbled out a tired sigh. “Yeah, yeah. I’m uh, going to go and do a few rounds through the city. If Lena does something bad, just scream, I’ll be there immediately.”

Personally speaking, Addy felt that screaming was a bit undignified, but she could see the mentality behind it. The words themselves brought the fact that she was still wearing that necklace Kara had sent her, the way it pressed cooly against her skin. If Lena’s motives were as Kara thought they’d be, it would be a shame, but she had to be sure. She had so much to learn, working there, and it was the best place to get possible leads on her power issue.

She just didn’t want to give up a good resource. That was all it was. She was certain of it.

* * *

It was getting dark by the time Addy actually made it to the L-Corp building.

The interior that she’d navigated to arrive at the elevator in the first place showed it was almost finished repairs at this point, even if there was some stuff still laying around. There was more security alongside all of it, even if nobody besides a select few ever actually made it into the building.

One of the last places to get a full repair, by Addy’s estimate anyway, was the hallway leading towards Lena’s office. She was growing fairly annoyed with the habit of hiding important offices behind long, bland corridors, but at least this time around the office she was walking towards had some yellow from all the hazard tape they’d pinned up around the area.

Unsurprisingly, Jess wasn’t where her desk normally was, in large part because someone had removed the desk itself, if not the rubble, indicating it probably hadn’t survived much of the explosion itself. The only thing they’d left, somewhat comically, was her chair, which looked completely out of place, very professionally-designed and sleek, when contrasted by the taped-down scattering of rubble in a roughly desk-shaped area in front of it.

The doors to Lena’s office were open, and Addy saw no real point in dallying around. She passed down the hallway, away from where she’d stepped off the elevator, ducking over one errant stripe of hazard tape and having to step highly over another. She passed a few broken windows, most of which had been taped over with plastic and wood, as well as an abandoned ladder sitting next to a gaping hole in the ceiling tiles.

Stepping through and into Lena’s office, she was surprised to find it had only suffered some damage. Most of the glass was destroyed, and one of the monitors was pointedly missing from its place on the wall, but other than that not a whole lot else was different.

Lena was in her seat, tiredly staring down at a half-pile of pages. Off to one side was a small, remote-shaped device, probably the one Kara had spoken of, if the style of it was any indication.

Addy cleared her throat, watching Lena jolt, glancing up at her with almost a flinch.

For a moment, she was burdened with Lena’s intense stare, before her face rather immediately fell.

“I’m assuming you’re coming to quit?” Lena asked, at last.

Addy said nothing, striding forward and taking up one of the seats in front of her desk. Lena watched her mutedly, face a bit confused and curious, but not particularly shocked by her actions.

“Tell me about the device?” she asked.

Lena blinked at her, long and slow, before glancing towards the device and picking it up. “It’s, well, an alien scanner. Or, rather, a human scanner—it looks for certain things one finds in a human digit, and if enough of them are absent, this little light flashes red.”

“What was the intent of the device?” Addy continued, staring at it.

“Medical and security, mostly,” Lena said, not looking at her. “Identifying whether or not your patient was an alien, despite appearances, is important, and... well, it has obvious security purposes.”

Just looking at the design herself, it was sleek enough. Small and handheld, probably ran off of a decent enough battery, but not one that would impact the price too much. It was a wonderful piece of technology, really, but Addy knew why that was, knew what it could be used for. She wondered if Lena didn’t.

It might be best to find out.

“May I see it?”

Lena glanced up at her, down at the device, then nodded, extending it out. Addy took it, cupped it in her palm, and looked it over. The weight certainly indicated a small battery, the parts it was working off of were probably relatively minimal as well. It’d probably be cheap and quick to make, if her hunch was right.

“This is well designed,” she complimented, watching the smile crawl onto Lena’s face. “I could have one of these attached to a number of doors in the city, whether government or privately owned, small enough that people don’t notice it when they touch it.”

Lena’s smile turned to confusion.

“Attach a camera to go off whenever it comes back with a negative signal, and I could develop a portfolio of most stealth aliens in perhaps a month, maybe more, it depends on whether or not I can do this legally or if I have to do it without other people’s consent. Of course, then I’d have a going list of a large number of aliens in National City, regardless of whether or not they joined the alien registry.”

Confusion turned to the early hints of horror.

“From there, it wouldn’t take much. Establish their schedules by mocking up a system to match photos of the same people. Get an idea of where they operate from, and then gather my team. Most aliens aren’t too powerful, it would be easy enough to collect them or simply outright kill them on the spot, from there.”

“Addy?” Lena tried, a bit hoarsely.

“Of course, it could also be used to track down those I dislike,” Addy continued, already seeing the blueprints of the plan take fruition. People tended not to like her plans, but it was easy enough to ask herself ‘how could I use this to eradicate aliens’ and go from there. It wasn’t like Addy was so repulsed by the idea that she couldn’t fathom it, she just didn’t think it was particularly necessary nor beneficial for her interpersonal relationships. “If I have theories that perhaps a child in the class of my child is an alien, I can plant these and do much the same. Perhaps it is the woman who got a job opportunity over me, and who might not even need to be an alien. After all, with these being mass-produced on the market, you’ve established that there are devices that can determine whether or not a person is a human or not, at this size, and at a good cost factor. A fake version wouldn’t take much to appear convincing, and suddenly I now have every ability to turn my enemies into victims.”

“I wouldn’t use it that way!” Lena burst out, hands slamming down on her desk as she lurched to her feet, looming. Her face was angry, twisted up, _hurt_.

Addy wasn’t particularly phased.

“You might not, but that hasn’t stopped the US government before, I doubt it will now.”

Lena’s posture faltered, face twitching.

“Nor will it when the government inevitably changes hands and suddenly alien rights are no longer on the ticket, and rather it’s support for the people who fear them.”

Lena’s tongue slipped across her lower lip, tense. “That, they can’t just—they can’t just do that.”

“It doesn’t need to be legal, Lena,” Addy said simply. “Even if they can’t get it through legal routes, they’ll find ways to recreate it from scratch, or at least something close to it. Unless this is made from complicated parts?”

Her posture faltered even more, slowly lowering her back down into her seat. “No—the only thing unique is the microchip, and it’s... not that expensive.”

“Then forget about the government, you’ll have copycats on the market not long after you announce it,” Addy supplied frankly. “Then again, you may benefit from that. After all, announcing something like this directly after a terror attack and the reveal of a terror organization focused against aliens?”

Lena winced.

“With L-Corp’s history?”

Her wince worsened.

“Why, I would consider that a signal to those who shared the desires of the former owner,” Addy said, injecting a tone into her voice that Kara had once called ‘creepily cheery’. “It would be a good way to indicate that the company intends to follow in Lex Luthor’s footsteps, even if that means back into prison. After all, even if this product was made completely in good faith, and only ever intended to be sold to medical professionals, it would still be polarizing aliens, as you would be inevitably forcing every alien to be public about their ethnicity. You’d be forcing the ones who’d lived entire lives on this planet, possibly ones who may not even think they’re an alien, to suddenly have to endure that type of scrutiny and harassment.”

For a moment, Lena just stared at her, sitting in her seat. Her hands open and closed, slowly, but tightly.

Addy had a theory. Perhaps not one made with all the knowledge about Lena, but with enough that she’d picked up during her small discussions with the woman. She was fairly certain Lena had some unconscious fears of aliens, perhaps rightfully so. Her family, or, well, at this time, mostly her brother, were known for being horrible towards them. It would, therefore, make sense for her to fear for her own life - or perhaps the lives of those who associated with her - under the assumption she may be attacked for her brother’s actions.

To a certain point, she could even be right.

“This is a good piece of technology,” Addy continued, slowly. “I think it is delightfully compact, and an easy way to indicate who is who. If you could find a way to program unique bio-signatures to people, rather than entire races, it could be used to hopefully counter aliens which can shapeshift, but not necessarily fully copy the physiology of another person, that things such as thumb scanners and retina scanners cannot.”

Lena nodded, slowly.

“But I also think it would be a very good weapon. Landmines with these attached could be armed behind doors, waiting for an alien to arrive. These could be used to systematically target every alien in a very subdued and hidden fashion. It would not take much, and if I was an organization looking to eradicate aliens, or at least ensure I always had control over them, I would want this, and I would be paying special interest to the person who made it.”

Lena blanched, at that.

If Cadmus would come for Maxwell, they would come for Lena, too. One of those she could handle, the other she was... fond of enough to want to stop something like that from happening. If Lena brought this to market, she’d be putting a target on her back, possibly even two, depending on how badly the alien community took it. It did not help that Lillian Luthor appeared to be heavily involved in Cadmus, and could use that as an avenue to conscript her daughter for the cause.

Addy carefully set the device back down on the desk, between them.

She’d do anything to stop something like that from happening, if she could. She had become rather quite fond of Lena, and knew from the first time she’d met that the woman didn’t hate aliens. Feared them, or rather, perhaps feared what she didn’t understand about them? Certainly. Addy did too. The fact that her body worked the way it did made no reasonable sense, and it had taken some time to pretend that it did so that she didn’t have to think too deeply about it.

Aliens were an unknown, and Lena didn’t like those, if Addy’s assessment of her was any indication.

“Once more, it’s a very good device if you wanted to eliminate or track aliens,” Addy began, once more. “But is that what you want to do? Was that what you had in mind when you were building it?”

Lena shook her head, sharply. “No! Of course not—”

“Then why did you?” Because Addy was, truth be told, struggling to find a good reason for it. Medical aid it might be, one could also legitimately use any number of other methods to check whether or not a person was a human. It was sometimes quite literally as easy as getting them under a direct beam of light.

Lena stared at her for a few moments, visibly hurt. Her expression wasn’t icy, not in the way she’d seen in others, just raw. She breathed in, then out, long and slow, almost choking on her own breath.

“I... need to think more on this,” Lena said haltingly. “I’m sorry Addy, but I need to ask you to go—just... just for now. Okay?”

Pushing up from her seat, Addy nodded. “I’m not quitting, by the way.”

Lena’s face softened a bit.

“But I’ll have to if you release that device,” she finished.

Lena’s eyes flicked up to her, widened minutely.

...She had not meant to say it that way. “I mean someone I know will make me quit,” she tried, instead.

Lena’s eyes just widened more, and it occurred to Addy that, if anything, that statement was almost _more_ incriminating.

She felt something overcome her, a sort of stilted discomfort. She... she knew of what this was. It was that feeling Taylor got around social situations. Awkwardness? Something like it.

“I’m just going to go,” she said, instead, stepping away from the desk and moving at a pace towards the elevators.

Kara wasn’t going to be happy, was she?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a big'un, obviously. Hope you enjoyed! We're finally progressing into the shake-ups I intend for season 2, so here's hoping you're excited!


	39. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets revenge.

Kara was not, in fact, happy.

It was late evening, and she’d only fairly recently arrived back home from Lena’s office. The television was set to a news program, turned low, talking about the Alien Amnesty Act signing that was going to be happening tomorrow. Their worries about the president risking too much in still making it a public venue - despite the very real attempt to kill her - were something Addy actually agreed with; a dead president would be quite the statement, and Cadmus seemed terribly invested in making them.

But, no. That wasn’t really the focus of her attention right now.

Kara sat across from her, in her pyjamas, with her head in her hands. Blonde tangles fell down around her fingers, left loose and uncontained by a ponytail.

She’d been like that for the last five minutes.

“Lena knows you’re an alien,” Kara repeated, slowly, like she still couldn’t believe it.

“Or at least has a reason to believe I may be one,” she acknowledged, turning her gaze away from Kara and down to her feet. Goose socks stared back up at her, and she wiggled some of her toes just to see the way the pictures stretched along with the fabric.

The sigh that blossomed out of Kara’s mouth was long, loud, and bordering on a groan. The sound of the couch creaking almost drew Addy’s gaze up from the floor, but she managed to hold back the impulse.

“That’s... not good,” Kara said, at last, her voice no longer muffled by her hands.

She wiggled her toes again, if only to distract herself. “I do not believe she will do anything about it.”

Across from her, Kara made a strangled noise, and Addy couldn’t help but look up again. On the coffee table, Kara’s laptop sat amongst piles of papers, with handwritten notes in the margins. A quick scan over the contents she’d avoided looking too deep into showed that they seemed to be related to statistics for what happens when minority groups are outed to those who are hostile to them.

She’d clearly been doing her homework, and a lot of it, by her estimate. What worried her now was that Kara might’ve taken her own understanding of the situation away from said research, and might not be terribly enthusiastic about letting it go.

“She’s building that device, isn’t she?” Kara cut back in, proving her very much right with how her tone was the slightest bit scathing. Not angry, not quite, but deeply frustrated.

Addy’s eyes flicked back to the floor, a touch involuntarily. “I’m not sure if she’ll be doing that either.”

That statement was met with deafening silence, a silence bad enough that she found herself peeking back up at Kara, who was now staring a bit blankly at her, confusion writ over her brows as they scrunched together in thought.

“Well, did you check?” Kara asked after another few moments.

Which... no. She hadn’t. In her haste to escape the awkward situation that she had, rather bluntly, put herself into, she really hadn’t thought about it. Indicating as much with a shake of her head, Kara threw her arms up, looking exasperated.

“Then how do you know?!”

She paused, at that. Tilted her head to one side to just think about how to phrase this, if only because she wasn’t sure how well Kara might take a full recounting of the conversation she had.

Finally, after a few more seconds to collect her thoughts, she decided. “I gave her a hypothetical of what those devices could be used for with very little effort,” she began, relatively confident that this was the best way to probably put it. “By the end of it, she looked deeply horrified and I believe she didn’t understand the ramifications of what she was building. She was very upset by the time I had completed the discussion.”

That earned her another stare, Kara’s face twitching as she visibly worked over her words. Addy could all but see the neurons firing in her brain, forming connections, opinions, thoughts.

“What did you say to her, exactly?”

Addy froze. That was not part of the plan.

Kara’s eyes narrowed a little. “ _Addy_ ,” she pressed, voice firm.

“I told her how they could be used to systematically eradicate or at least identify every alien in the city.”

Kara’s face shifted from suspicion to outright horror. “You told her how to kill aliens with it.” It wasn’t a question, more of a statement.

Despite her better attempts to achieve the contrary, Kara was evidently not taking what she was supposed to away from this. “Lena is a very smart person,” Addy pointed out, a touch stubbornly. “But those thoughts didn’t even occur to her. I doubt she would do so in the first place, if that’s the case.”

Finally, the words made it through to Kara, who breathed out in a noisy huff and slumped backwards. Her back was arched oddly, neck behind her shoulders, as she stared up at the ceiling. Certainly, if not for the fact that she had superhuman abilities, that position would probably be deeply uncomfortable.

For a while, it was just silence, Kara wordlessly staring vacantly up at the ceiling as her hands flexed against the cushions on the couch. The only real sound that Addy could pick up on was her own breathing and the steady whirr of Kara’s laptop, whose cooling system was evidently working overtime.

“...Are you sure?” Kara asked, at last. Her voice was timid, tentative.

Not that Addy knew why, exactly. “Sure of?”

Kara craned her neck back around, shrugging forward until she had rearranged her posture into something less painful to look at. “Lena not being—bad.”

Personally, Addy wasn’t sure if she was the greatest judge of character when it came to the arbitrary lines humans and other sentient creatures drew for what was or was not entirely acceptable. She wasn’t terribly fond of said lines in the first place, but all of that said, she liked to think she was the greatest judge of character when it came to things that actually _mattered_. Still, she could probably work in the boundaries, at least this time around. “I do not think Lena understood the capacity that device had for harm,” Addy explained, matter-of-factly. “She appears to have made it in large part because of unconscious bias which has led her to feel as though aliens are potential hostiles. I believe now that she understands what even a rudimentary copy of the device could do if put into the wrong hands, and will abstain from bringing it to the market.”

Kara flopped again, looking a bit more relaxed. “I hope you’re right,” she admitted quietly. “She—she seemed so _good_ , you know? Something genuine and honest to come out of the Luthor family after all the stuff they’ve done. Someone who, who got what it was like.”

Her gaze shifted down to her, a little worried still, but less soul-crushingly miserable as it had been when Addy had informed her of the predicament in the first place.

“But Addy, the rules—they still apply,” Kara stressed, leaning forward a bit. “We’re going to have to tell Alex tomorrow that she probably has a good idea that you’re an alien, and if that device still comes on the market...”

Addy breathed in, let the air struggle in her lungs for a few moments, before letting it out. She didn’t like playing in absolutes, but she understood why people took comfort from them. “I will quit, if it does.”

Rules were rules, after all, regardless of how much she may dislike them. 

* * *

The D.E.O. was, predictably, heavily packed. Agents stood shoulder-to-shoulder, forming row after row in loose crescents around the raised platform at the head of the operation room.

Addy was in costume, of course, as this time she was actually here officially. Kara, next to her, was much the same, her costume fluttering slightly from the wind drifting in through the open drone landing at the far other end of the space.

J’onn stalked across the raised platform with long strides of his legs, face stern, orderly. His pace slowed, drew to a halt as he neared the center of the platform, and stopped entirely as he turned to focus his attention on everyone below.

“Against recommendations to the contrary, President Marsdin will still be going through with a public signing today,” J’onn started, voice more than a little dry. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was in something of a bad mood. “Which means we have to prepare for the worst. The signing will take place in nine hours, in a public, open space.”

He turned, fishing a small remote out of his pocket and pointing it at the screens behind him. They lit up in unison, faces, text, locations, even equipment statistics blooming across them.

“We know several things about this case, after some investigation. First and foremost is that the culprit for the original attack was an Infernian wearing a suit capable of turning them nearly indetectable, and who we have reason to believe is being deployed either unwillingly or under threat of retaliation by Cadmus, due to a larger string of missing Infernians being noted within the last month.”

The crowd around her grew a bit tumultuous at that, murmuring between one another. She could make out questions about what an Infernian was, about Cadmus, but the voices grew fainter and dimmed as J’onn kept his silence, until they guttered and died entirely, leaving the space silent once again.

“With the missing Infernians, and the fact that Fort Rozz is missing several very similar types of power armour, that leads me to the second thing: we must assume, going into this, that Cadmus is directly involved. As a consequence, Metallo is at high risk of making an appearance, as Cadmus would benefit tremendously in terms of public fear and terror by killing the president, and it is highly unlikely they will not take the chance, even if it means showing their hand.

“All of that in mind, we have certain countermeasures for the above. Kryptonite shielding will be distributed as it was during the president’s arrival. We will be additionally deploying the promethium and kryptonite scanners, which we’ve had online and placed throughout the city over the last week. To account for the Infernian, fireproof gear will be handed out to everyone, as well as facial coverings that can protect against inhaling toxic fumes such as smoke, and we’ll be placing heat sensors to see if the armour has also shielded itself from those.

“Moving away from defensive equipment, we have recently discovered Metallo is at least vulnerable to powerful electrical discharges, unlikely to be general, but is known to negatively affect him tangibly when directly applied to his exposed kryptonite core. Tasers will be required for this mission, and we will be looking into deploying some of the electrical weaponry we have stored on-base.”

J’onn turned away from them, then, pacing back towards the screens. He levelled his remote at it again, tapping a button to cause four of the screens to bring up a single image of a map. On it were red dots, showing something of a wide spray pattern across it, though most of them were largely located in the downtown regions of National City.

“What we know of Cadmus’ current operations is both limited in scope and yet general enough to extrapolate from. The most recent attack we know of - the warehouse incident - was unlikely to be an attack specifically on aliens, but rather an attempt to find and obtain tech from Maxwell Lord, who owned the warehouse, and who turned their offers down and was as a consequence nearly murdered in his office.

“Outside of strategic attacks on places where people may be storing technology, Cadmus has spent no small amount of time targeting and abducting aliens. It would appear they have insider knowledge into the communities, and know certain cultural habits, as they have been utilizing them to attack when they’d least be expected to. Cadmus may be rounding up aliens to make them attack during the signing, as if they succeed, it would make for a very good justification to institute their rule if a president just happens to die at the hands of aliens when she’s trying to make peace with them.

“Altogether, this means that Cadmus is a _wild card_ ,” J’onn said, with great emphasis on the last few words, turning his attention fully back to them. “The exact things they can bring to the table are an immediate unknown, and countermeasures _must_ be flexible to account for that. Now, any questions or suggestions?”

Addy had a few. She raised her hand, just in time to see Kara do the same.

Kara stared at her hand for a moment, smiling sheepishly. “You go ahead first, Administrator.”

Not one to reject the chance, she focused back on J’onn. “I have a colleague who happens to be very interested in electrical weaponry, and who will likely not be opposed to helping weaponize it to protect the president. I request we bring her on board for the operation.”

J’onn’s stare was scrutinizing, vaguely suspicious, like he had some idea of who she was talking about. “Will she be able to prepare something in the time we have left?”

Serling wasn’t exactly normal. “I have no reason to believe otherwise.”

J’onn, slowly, nodded. “I’ll send Agent Danvers with you, Administrator. She will acquire the requisite forms to ensure your colleague’s silence, in the meantime. Now, Supergirl?”

“Well,” Kara started, sounding a bit nervous. “I was thinking there was also someone else who could possibly help us and who has electricity powers?”

J’onn just stared at her.

Kara stared back.

“You’re recommending we bring Livewire on board for this operation,” he said, slowly.

“I am suggesting that she can be very dangerous when the need suits her, yes.”

J’onn shut his eyes, reaching up to brush a thumb over the bridge of his nose. “Fine,” he said at last, eyes cracking open to glance somewhere into the throng of agents. “Agent Vasquez will go with you. I’m assuming you’ll fly over to her last known location?”

When J’onn glanced back their way, Kara nodded.

“Anyone else?” J’onn asked, scanning across the crowd.

There was a bit of a murmur, and Addy turned her head around to peek over the rest of the agents. Off in the distance, a ways back by her estimate, a hand was peeking out above everyone else, fingers twitching.

“Agent Schott?”

Ah. Winn.

The hand fell back beneath the tides of people as Winn, presumably, moved through them. People parted, got out of the way, and let him arrive at the foot of the platform. Winn glanced up at J’onn, who merely motioned for him to come up, which he did with a few quick steps up the nearby ledge.

Turning to the crowd, he looked suddenly a whole lot more nervous than he normally did. Which was really saying something, as Winn was categorically the most nervous person Addy had ever met.

“I, uh, due to the, y’know, recent... problems we’ve had with fighting combatants dead set on destroying our democracy? I’ve made some stuff. For everyone. That I am hopefully getting permission to deploy..?”

She spared a quick look in J’onn’s direction, who was nodding firmly at Winn.

Apparently regaining some of his confidence, Winn continued. “Which I _have_ gotten permission to deploy. We’ll uh, there won’t be many, as I’ve spent most of my time designing the kryptonite suits for both Administrator and Supergirl down there—hi you two—but I’ve got things for everyone else as well. These include a long, rod-like device that I’ve mocked up which should, in theory, disrupt the energy found inside of the fire the Infernian makes to hopefully put it out. Thanks, by the way, whoever informed me that it wasn’t real fire, it’s helped a lot in designing that. I will also be working on rigging up tasers to be a bit more lethal in discharge. If you’re interested in handling _very_ prototype weapons, and get uh, Director J’onn’s permission, come to me, and we can work something out.”

A hand poked at her side as Winn continued on, his voice lapsing out of her focus as she turned to look. Alex was staring at her from amongst the crowd, which had dispersed out a bit with Winn breaking up the more neat rows. Now it was more of a loose crowd, with enough distance between people that you could reasonably squeeze through it, if significantly less professional in presentation.

“Is it who I think it’s going to be?” Alex asked over the sound of Winn’s rambling.

Addy just nodded.

“Oh, _joy_ ,” Alex muttered, reaching up to comb fingers through her hair. “Did you know I read her file? Honestly, the people you work with worry me sometimes.” 

“If it’s any consolation, I believe Serling has learned to channel her fervent desire for destruction and mayhem into underground robot fight clubs,” Addy said, hoping that it did help her anxiety a little.

Alex’s face cramped up even worse. “It... it isn’t. Addy, why would that make me feel any better?”

“Because at least this time it’s not being used on people.”

* * *

Addy still couldn’t quite get over the fact that Serling had chosen one of the most stereotypical suburbs to live in.

Not that she didn’t understand her reasoning. No, she could see the value in having a nuclear bomb shelter beneath one’s house, but it didn’t change the fact that Serling as a whole was a person who did not fit in with the general population of the area.

If anything, Serling felt like she should be found in one of two places: a hermit’s hut, outside of city limits, surrounded by a chainlink fence, or one of those massive apartment buildings you saw being developed in the especially high-density parts of the world, where the general consensus had been to ditch building wide and instead go for tall.

The car lurched a bit as it hopped from the street level to the incline of Serling’s driveway, easing itself to a stop as it reached the bumper of an existing car.

Addy spared a glance at the front door of the house, watched it open and Serling’s head pop out from the inside, staring suspiciously at them. She was fairly confident that Serling had cameras strategically located around the area, but she’d yet to find any evidence of such a thing other than how timely she could be when people were coming around.

Alex, in the driver’s seat, made a low grunt of frustration as she twisted the keys from the ignition and popped the door, unbuckling as she went. Addy did the same, following her out into the open air.

Dry Californian heat met her as she passed out onto the pavement below - and she was again coming to learn that while it couldn’t really bother her much, she much preferred cooler temperatures despite it - a bit choking and stale, without even a nip of wind. The coastal parts of California weren’t so bad, with the sea there to offset the horrendous dryness of the region, but this was hardly beachfront property.

Turning her focus back to Serling, she watched as the woman’s head swung between both herself and Alex, lingering mostly on her costume, her face mask.

“Look!” Serling called out, her voice managing to carry down the length of the driveway. “Whatever you _think_ I did, I didn’t!”

Shutting her door behind her, Addy glanced Alex’s way. She was staring at Serling, eyes slightly narrowed, with a deeply reluctant expression on her face.

“Actually, Ms. Roquette,” Alex hollered back, her voice steady and her face smoothing out into something more professional. “We’re here to extend you an offer.” With that, she started walking forward, steps carrying her up the tilt of the driveway, with Addy picking up her pace to match.

Serling merely edged behind the door just a little more, leaving just a sliver of her nose, some of her cheekbone, and a suspiciously-squinted eye visible. “I’ll have you know, shadowy government agencies trying to sway me to their side is nothing new to me.”

They drew to a halt just at the foot of the porch, leaving a few bodies width between themselves and Serling, not that the woman seemed to appreciate their closeness anyway, if the way the door was inching increasingly closed was any indication.

“It’s a matter of national security, Ms. Roquette,” Alex said, voice still composed. “The president’s life is in danger, and we’ve been led to believe you may have exactly the right tools to ensure the people who _may_ try to kill her don’t make it that far.”

Finally, that seemed to spur something in Serling. The door creaked open a little more, allowing her head to fully emerge from within once more. Her eyes remained narrowed in suspicion, but it was certainly an improvement from when she’d been mere seconds away from slamming the door in their faces. “Cut the shit. What’s your angle?”

Alex’s composure broke. She sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose and shoot Addy a bit of an unfair grimace, as it certainly wasn’t _her_ fault that people didn’t know how to engage with Serling without inspiring her to become like that. You just had to know that she was raised in Gotham, and responded to potential threats as though they were real ones. A smart, if exhausting way to be safe, in her opinion.

“We want your electric buzz saw,” Alex said at last, eyes flicking away from Addy. “As well as your expertise with electrically-infused weaponry.”

The door creaked open just a bit more, showing a sliver of what Serling was wearing—pyjamas, if the skull-and-bones print was anything to go by. “...That’s it? No demanding I make you another copy of The Fog, or like, fuck, what was the last one? _Build us a robot which can replace someone’s cells?_ ”

“In fact,” Alex interrupted, apparently sensing the oncoming rant. “We will pay you to do something that is literally the opposite of that. We don’t care about your robots.”

“Well, _I_ do,” Serling responded snidely, sounding unimpressed about the honour of her robots being impugned. Or, at least she did for the few seconds it took her to process what Alex had just said, by Addy’s estimate. “Wait, _pay_?”

The door swung open entirely, revealing Serling outfitted in a set of skull-and-bones covered pyjamas, some fluffy looking slippers, and a gun clutched in the other hand, if pointed in the opposite direction of them.

That was one of Serling’s major failings—avarice. Well, that and neuroticism when it suited her, anyway.

“Yes,” Alex grit out. “ _Pay_. Handsomely, might I add.” Each word that left her lips sounded painful, like she was struggling to even get them out. Honestly, considering Alex apparently handled some of the D.E.O.’s budget management, it probably was.

“Aw shit,” Serling said, something like a smile stretching over her face, the sort of smile Addy had come to associate with her being about ten seconds away from hauling out some new weapon of war she was going to graft to a robot in the near future. “You should’ve mentioned as much, muffin-top.”

For whatever reason, that elicited a startled noise of honest-to-goodness anger out of Alex. “ _Excuse m_ —”

“I’ll be right back with my shit, and a better pair of clothes,” Serling interrupted, and promptly slammed the door in their faces.

Addy glanced towards Alex, searched deeply for any signs of muffins.

She found none.

“What does muffin-top mean?” She asked, at last, because unless some of the crumbs on Alex’s sleeve were from a muffin, she was drawing a blank.

Alex opened her mouth, glanced at Addy, then shut it. After a moment, she grunted. “Nothing you have to worry about.”

Turning her gaze down to her own body, she wasn’t really sure what her flesh had to do with muffins. “Because I am an alien?” She asked, if only for clarification. She’d look it up later, anyway.

Alex pointedly didn’t look in her direction. “Let’s just go with that.”

Silence stretched out after that point, lasting a truly uncomfortable amount of time. Serling, evidently, was taking her good time to get her things ready, and while Addy could agree and even encourage being careful and prepared, she wasn’t so fond about standing around doing nothing for fifteen minutes.

But that’s just what she did.

The door clattered, knob twisting before it was yanked open. Serling emerged with her buzzsaw under one arm and a toolbox under the other, with a larger backpack thrown over her back. She’d changed clothes too, into paint-stained sweatpants and a black, thin long-sleeved turtleneck that looked dreadfully hot, but matched well with her black boots, if it was any consolation.

Turning in one smooth movement, Serling fitted her key into the lock, made some odd body movements to wrench her wrist in the right direction without dropping anything, and then pocketed her keys once she was certain the door was locked. Turning back to the two of them, she grinned. “Speaking of, how much is handsomely paid? If possible, can it be a yacht?”

Alex turned away without answering, starting down the driveway. Addy kept behind her, keeping an ear on Serling by virtue of the fact that every move the woman made was accompanied by a chorus of metal clattering from her supplies.

“You may hash that out with my boss,” Alex replied, arriving at the car and popping the driver’s door open. Sweeping around to the other side, Addy pulled the passenger seat door open and slid in as well, grimacing as she came into contact with sticky, warm plastic. “Speaking of,” Alex began, reaching down to pop open the little hatch beneath the driver’s seat, retrieving a black sack of some kind with a drawstring. “I’m going to need to put a bag over your head so you don’t know where we’re located.”

Serling, managing to get the backseat door open, just chortled. “Kinky.”

“...Don’t make this into a thing,” Alex said, almost pleaded, as she turned around and leaned over the back of her chair to get within grabbing distance of Serling.

“Whatever you say, Agent Muffin-Top.”

“It’s Danvers, _Agent Danvers_. For the love of God, just call me Agent Danvers.”

Serling merely grinned in response to that, Alex grumbling as she reached forward to rather rudely yank the black sack down over her self-satisfied face.

Addy didn’t know why she kept rising to Serling’s bait, but then she was already rather used to Serling as a whole. Maybe it just took longer for other people?

* * *

The D.E.O. was home to a rather large expanse of underground parking. As was to be expected, of course, when you owned a fleet of military-grade, armoured vehicles and didn’t want to get them stolen and/or lost.

Still, she didn’t really like the underground parking space. The air was stale and faintly smelled and almost _tasted_ of metal and rubber, the entire thing was the same uniform blotchy gray colour that came with concrete, and none of the vehicles parked inside could be bothered to be any more imaginative than uniform black.

Addy turned, catching sight of Alex tugging the bag from Serling’s head and stepping away to let her climb out of the vehicle on her own. The woman cast a pretty wide glance around the area, her footsteps echoing off of the walls as she paced forwards a few steps.

“Downtown National City?” Serling hedged, because of course she did.

A little off to the right, Alex shut the door to the van and glanced, pleadingly, in her direction, to where she had wandered off to after they’d parked the car.

Addy was of the opinion you should fight your own battles, if at all possible, and Serling wasn’t exactly going to stop being the way she was if you called for aid every time she tried to annoy you. It was why Serling couldn’t get very far in annoying her when they worked, because she merely responded honestly when she could.

That and she was currently under orders not to speak too much, out of concern her tone might give her identity away to Serling. She was surprised at how much a costume could do to blot out the perception of people you were in close proximity to frequently, but as far as she’d been able to tell, Serling was no wiser to her identity than your average onlooker might be.

Taking her refusal for what it was, Alex turned her attention back to Serling. “What did I tell you?”

Serling glanced her way, hefting her gear a bit higher up her body. “Not to guess the location of the D.E.O. base?”

“And what are you doing?”

“Guessing the location of your parking lot,” Serling said, wisely.

Unfortunately, Alex wasn’t up for it. “Right,” she groused, turning in the direction of the stairwell and elevators. “Let’s get going, before you say something that I actually have to _detain_ you for.”

Now, see? That’s how you handled Serling. You either didn’t let her annoy you in the first place, or you threatened her. Serling respected intimidation.

Following after both Alex and Serling as they approached the metal elevators, Addy swept her gaze across the amassed cars a few more times. She was really going to have to tell someone that undercover cars shouldn’t look like that; they were more than a little conspicuous. At least get rid of the tinted glass, at the bare minimum.

Arriving at the elevators, Alex jabbed the button, one of two elevators pulling open immediately. Piling into the cramped space, she watched Alex press her thumb to a reader, wait a few seconds, then jab in a floor number, the doors sliding shut with a _click_.

The elevator lurched, then ascended.

“You know, this is probably the most boring secret black-ops site I’ve been to,” Serling announced a mere few seconds later, disrupting the silence. “Where's the massive statues of like, Nixon or Reagan? Where are the test tubes full of incriminating evidence? Concrete and black vans, how _unique_.”

Alex, over Serling’s head, was shooting her a truly venomous look of betrayal, as though it was _her_ fault Serling had come to see the value in colours after showing her how birds used them for intimidation tactics. If anything, she was merely spreading better ideas, and if people now had opinions about them, well, maybe they’d start painting things instead of leaving them the colour of oatmeal. It’d be a benefit for everyone.

“We’re here on very serious matters,” Alex said, turning her ire onto Serling. “You should act like it. The president’s life is in danger.”

Serling shot Alex a vacant look. “Whoever recommended me should’ve made it clear that’s just how I operate.”

Alex didn’t twitch or look in her direction, but Addy had the feeling she was being silently judged. Alex had said she had read Serling’s file, and going by the fact that Serling had mentioned it, it should probably include notes from the agents who did check-ups on her on the behest of the American government. She should know better.

The elevator doors peeled open just in time to save Serling - and possibly by extension, herself - a tremendous dressing-down. Alex was out of the elevator first, with Serling following after her and Addy keeping up the rear. She watched Serling scan over the area, at the closed doors and various “DO NOT ENTER” signs that littered this end of the main floor.

Addy kept pace with Alex as they marched down the long corridor, off towards the main research lab. There wasn’t a whole lot else down in this part of the wing _besides_ the lab, which had mostly been overtaken by Winn, if the chatter she’d picked up on was any indication. It was tucked away at the far end of the corridor, a door on the left wall which was already open and waiting as they arrived.

The lab itself was a mess. Scorch marks covered one particularly abused metal table, projects were strewn about in haphazard piles, most of which appeared to have been gutted. Raised up in the center of the room on a platform was a long rod that sparked near the top end, flickering with pearlescent light.

Winn, at least, looked like he belonged. He was a ways away from the sparking rod, hunched over a computer and pecking words into it with fast stabs of his fingers. The fringe of his hair - or what little of it there was - had been forced up and back, kept in place by a welder’s helmet he had strapped to his head. It, too, didn’t escape the scorch marks, as its surface had acquired one long smudged mark from the bottom left to the top right.

Alex cleared her throat, Winn jolting at the noise. He wheeled around to the three of them, blinking owlishly as he came back down to earth from whatever he’d been working on.

“Oh, hey Alex. What’s up? You uh, need something?” His eyes, despite his words, were trained rather directly on Serling, who was staring back at him. His face was confused, whereas Serling’s was calculating.

“Agent Schott, this is going to be your lab partner for the remainder of this operation, Serling Roquette.”

Winn blinked, processing, before hopping off his stool, wiping his hands down on his pants, and approaching. He extended his hand out for her to take, which she did. “Good to meet you, I’m Winn Schott.”

“No shit, Toyman?” Serling asked, shaking his arm up and down.

Winn’s face cramped, went through a cycle of emotions, before landing on snide. That was a bad idea. “No shit, the fog?” He mimed back at her, trying to copy her voice and doing a surprisingly good rendition of it.

Unfortunately for Winn, this was not a battle he could win. His face cramped more as Serling visibly clenched his hand in a painful grip. After a few moments of Winn trying to escape it, she released it with a breezy smile.

Winn pulled his hand back to his chest, looking mildly terrified.

Serling, in turn, merely reached forward and clapped him on the shoulder with enough force to make the _thwack_ audible. Twice. With Winn squeaking in pain with each wallop.

“I’m sure we’ll get along _just_ fine,” Serling said, her voice implying the exact opposite. “Anyhow, where do you keep the outlets?”

Winn motioned in the vague direction of the top-right corner of the room, Serling mouthing a cheeky ‘thanks’ in his direction as she wandered off towards it. His gaze turned to the two of them next, looking a mix of betrayed and wounded, clutching at his battered shoulder with his equally battered hand.

“Good luck, Agent Schott, I’ll be back around in two hours with files for her to sign,” Alex said, displaying precisely zero mercy for her fellow man. “Administrator, with me.”

Turning away from Winn and leaving him with Serling to deal with, Addy followed along after Alex, back down the long corridor and towards where the main mission area was. As they grew closer to it, the population of the building began to make an appearance. Agents lingered, milling about in small groups of 2 or 3, looking on edge, but ultimately prepared.

The corridor was a winding thing, but with Alex there to guide, they were leaving it under a minute later, passing through the threshold and out into the mission area.

She scanned over the crowd, from J’onn to Vasquez to, finally, Kara. She stood next to one of the tables, talking lightly with Vasquez, who was across from her. They were both, rather pointedly, alone.

Alex jogged forward, apparently seeing the same thing. “Supergirl!” She called out, Kara’s head turning, face softening as she took the two of them in. “No luck?”

Kara shook her head, Addy picking up her own pace so she could get within hearing range. “No, Livewire told me, to quote, ‘take a walk and hopefully get hit by a car’, end quote.”

From what few interactions she’d had with Leslie, that did seem rather in-character.

Slowing to a stop just next to Alex, Addy waved her fingers at Kara, who waved them back in turn. Vasquez glanced between the three of them, knowing, but not inclined to interrupt.

“We’ll just have to make do without them, in that case,” J’onn announced as he stepped away from his own gaggle of agents, nodding in her direction. “Supergirl, Administrator, Agent Danvers, with me.”

Kara nodded, taking up Addy’s right while Alex took up her left. J’onn, at the front, walked them through the throng of agents and up the few small steps to the raised platform, onto where he normally situated himself next to all of the tracking equipment and monitors. Motioning for them to get closer, he directed them all towards a single table, on which was a series of maps, notes, and other details.

“We’ve decided on who is being deployed where, with certain intentions in mind. Supergirl, you will be on the front lines, a way to direct attention to yourself. You’ll be visible and prepared to handle an outright, frontal attack on the president, as you are our best bet in terms of turning away potential gunfire if they do go to those lengths.”

Kara looked at J’onn, nodding minutely.

J’onn glanced back down at the pages. “I will be deployed among the secret service myself as a way to forestall any potential traitors among them, which there is a possibility of. I will be leaving the command of the engagement to Agent Danvers, as I will have to blend in among the other federal agents, and issuing orders would be more than a little out-of-character.”

Alex didn’t even so much as budge at the explanation. Evidently, she’d either prepared for such an outcome, or had already spoken with J’onn about it. Addy was certain she would do good in the role as a leader for this.

J’onn’s eyes turned to her, then, drawing her attention back down.

“Administrator, you’re intended to be deployed further back, out of sight, to act as both a final reserve and as a last line of defence. While you may not be as physically powerful as Supergirl, you are by far our best last resort, as far as I can tell there is very little you cannot overwhelm psychically. If all else fails, it’s expected that you will go all out, understood?”

She did and nodded to indicate as much. She might not want to have to rely on using her coreself’s resources again, but it wouldn’t be too unacceptable to do so. There were limits, but very little on the planet could push her that far. So long as the shielding equipment Winn was developing was being put to use and she wasn’t mentally incapacitated, it was unlikely she’d struggle to do as requested of her.

“In terms of fallback points, there are several.” J’onn gestured towards the map, his finger skating between red dots that had been painted across its surface. “We have pre-set defensive equipment in each of these locations, as well as a reserve of agents that I’ve chosen among the ones I know are loyal. In the event of an attack, your number one goal is to take the president to these in order, and if they continue to follow you, move to the next.

“With that in mind, agents will be spread out among the surrounding area as countermeasures to potential snipers as well as to act as our own. If push comes to shove, we’re allowed to go live with the ammunition to take down our opponents, and this applies to everyone here. The president is an incredibly important figure, and if it comes down to it, you have the government’s blessing to work with lethal force. We cannot let her die.”

J’onn looked back up to them, lips turned down. Addy felt the urge to reach out and push it upright, but managed to control herself. She didn’t like J’onn looking so sad, but she had very little way to stop him from being so. “Superman will not be joining us for this one, unfortunately,” he said, slowly, with genuine frustration. “It would appear someone took it upon themselves to go on a bomb-laying spree, leaving threats, and having Superman stop them. He doesn’t have enough time to come back over here, and it would not surprise me if the number of bomb threats went significantly up during the president’s signing ceremony.”

“Do you think Cadmus is involved?” Kara asked, sounding a bit unsure.

“Could be them,” J’onn conceded, but didn’t sound entirely sure. “Or it could be any of the other groups which may wish to take advantage of the president’s current predicament to sow chaos and arrive at their own ends. In the end, it doesn’t matter, it’s keeping him occupied. We have approximately eight hours until the signing event, enough time to prepare last-minute defences and to make some adjustments to our plans, but not much else. Whatever you need to do to be ready, do so, then report back.”

* * *

The venue for the speech had been changed, if only to account for possible infiltrators knowing of the last. The new venue was an outdoor stage, connected to a larger building behind it, with a curtain backdrop and everything. The area in front of them was a pavilion, wide and made from concrete, with trees and green grass left in planters in chosen locations. A commons area, in other words.

Addy was tucked away, back behind the stage, staring at the ground.

“My fellow Americans,” Marsdin’s voice began, made loud and almost harsh on the ears by the pair of speakers next to her. “Over a century ago, this nation erected a monument in New York Harbour.”

“ _No sign of hostiles,_ ” Kara’s voice crackled over the line, broadcast from her vantage point floating up above. “ _Winn?_ ”

“ _Nothing on any of the radars. Heat, kryptonite, promethium_ ,” Winn replied, nervous.

“A Statue of Liberty.” Marsdin paused as applause rippled through the crowd, waiting. “That statue looked down upon Ellis Island, where thousands of immigrants came to seek refuge from a home country that didn’t want them, that wouldn’t have them.”

“ _Team four has nothing either,_ ” a voice replied.

“ _Don’t get comfortable,_ ” Alex interrupted, sharp. “ _We had nothing until the president nearly died last time, too. Keep your eyes and ears open._ ”

“But America took them in,” Marsdin continued, her voice growing in force, intensity. “That is _our_ story. The American people stand as one with history.”

It was evening, with dusky skies and a surprisingly calm air, despite the assassination attempts over the last couple of days. Through the small window in the space she was waiting, hidden out of sight, she watched the light filter down through the dust, cast her eyes towards where agents waited next to a closed door, just in case they had to rush Marsdin out quickly.

She was outfitted, as well. Winn had completed the kryptonite shields, to a certain extent, though hers were much higher in quantity than Kara’s, who had merely had to get one slapped to her chest. Instead, her kryptonite shields were a pair of wrist bands, anklets, a belt, and a headband, as well as a round shield on her chest. Altogether, they linked up, projecting a slight shimmer across her body that indicated its active state, like a forcefield, projected from each piece and matching up with the rest. It would keep her safe enough from Kryptonite, within reason, though Winn had warned that they were more fragile than she probably expected.

The crowd’s cheering picked up, drawing her back to the present. Applause rippled through it, growing louder and with a few hoots and hollers, before slowly fading back down into muted rumbling.

“No longer will our alien visitors be strangers, committed to the shadows, forced to the fringes of a hostile and unwelcoming world.” Marsdin made a noise, a soft huff of laughter or joy, Addy couldn’t be quite sure. “They will be granted the full rights and privileges of American citizens.”

Applause erupted again.

Nevertheless, Marsdin continued through it. “The Statue of Liberty will stand for aliens, too.” She breathed out again, loud enough that the mic captured the noise. “Now, uh, if someone could just hand me a pen...”

There was some laughter from the crowd. Addy listened as shoes scraped across the floor, on the other side of the curtain to herself, a soft ‘thank you’ spoken by Marsdin as someone, presumably, handed a pen off to her.

A few more steps, then.

“Here we go,” Marsdin’s voice called out, once again through the speakers. “History.”

As if on cue, noise ripped into being. A loud, violent explosion of sound and force as the curtain was sent back into Addy’s side from the wind force behind it. Screaming erupted among the crowd as chatter filled in her earpiece; sound-offs, location finding, moving the president to somewhere safe. The Infernian had attacked.

Addy swung forward, slipped out through the crack of the curtain, peeking through it and down into the crowd below.

The people down there were scattering, running in every which direction as flame roared up and across the ground, arriving just shy of the stage the president was on. Kara was in the air, swooping down towards where the fire originated from, lashing out with one hand at something nobody could see. It cracked against solid air, and the air itself almost appeared to shatter; flickering and buzzing as a figure was knocked into view and away a half-dozen steps.

Just like she remembered, the figure was clad in power armour, venting steam where Kara’s fist had cracked a hole in it. The body toppled along the ground, skidding as metal sparked against the concrete, only to stop themselves by wrenching one arm out and catching the concrete. The person threw themselves to their feet, and ignited entirely in flame, reaching out with both hands to direct twin rivers of fire right at Kara, who took it on the chest and was sent flying back two dozen or so feet.

The Infernian turned in an instant, towards the president. The helmet on their face ignited in light, a magnesium-white so bright it almost hurt to look at, before twin red beams emerged from the little slats, sent directly towards the president. A secret service agent stepped out, his form shimmering as he went from human to Martian; J’onn. He hauled the president away, narrowly avoiding the heat lasers which, instead, bore straight into and then through the curtain, catching the back wall on fire.

A fire alarm started to blare, loud and noisy.

Right, she should probably handle this. Rising to her feet, Addy turned, lowered her center of mass, getting a better angle on the Infernian. It would be—

“ _We’ve got pings on promethium and kryptonite! Right near you, Administrator!_ ”

She twisted around in a heartbeat, catching sight of the president as she was dragged back behind the curtain and towards the fire exit on the stage. An agent was holding the door open, his figure catching on the light as it shimmered.

She was moving forward without thinking about it, grabbing her new tool from her belt. The axe was weighty in her hand, and she dragged her thumb towards the power switch.

The agent’s disguise fell entirely, light refracting and rippling as a 5’3’’, squat looking man became Metallo in the flesh, his chest bared and rippling with an influx of energy. Green electricity arced from where the metal stuck out along his chest, where the core of pure kryptonite pulsed wildly with light.

Addy’s feet lifted from the ground and she shot forward like a bullet, raising one of her wrist bands just in time to catch the outgoing surge of kryptonite energy, the green beam catching on the device but not breaking through it, instead being deflected off to the side, where it scoured into the boards below, shattering them in a flurry of dust and splinters. The horrified shriek of the president behind her was ignored; she could handle that woman’s mental health later, she had someone to hurt.

After all, Metallo had hurt Kara. In fact, Metallo had been making the last several days a miserable slog of being unable to go to work, having to deal with friends in arguments, and worrying that Kara still might die because of him. No, if anything, Addy was very angry. Annoyed. It had been simmering at the back of her head, it was why she hadn’t been talking much. She had to focus, had to be sure, that he couldn’t hurt her again.

Her thumb pressed the switch and the buzz saw roared to life, sparking wildly with electricity.

Metallo stared at her, at the devices on her person, and at the axe in her hand. He didn’t do anything for a few moments, possibly baffled by the fact that he was no longer at an immediate advantage to her.

Then, with little warning, he lunged, a snarl on his lips.

Addy met him half-way, reaching out to unspool her power and draw the radius wide. She felt him not as a psychic presence, not like she did the other people around her, but as a void, an absence. Apparently, Cadmus had been getting into anti-psychic technology as well; unpleasant, but not unable to be accounted for. She dragged her field in close, amped up the intensity, all in time to meet Metallo dead on.

He swung a fist at her sloppily, without much grace, and she slipped back with her flight to avoid it. She swung down at him from her position up above, hovering as she was, the whirr of the buzzsaw only slicing through thin air as he scrambled out of the way of her swing.

Still, that gave her the advantage.

She pushed his scramble, diving in close, swinging her axe down again, and again, each time met with a flurry of movement as Metallo scrambled out of the way. She couldn’t tell if he was panicking, but his movements indicated as much. Or at least they did until he swung up with one leg, catching her dead in the stomach, and turned his chest towards the president, energy lighting up in a raw, near-blinding green light before lurching out in a wide cone. 

Addy swung forward and caught it with her chest, the beam deflected back towards the far wall, where it met brick and scoured through it like a spoon through butter, raining fist-sized chunks down around Metallo as he ducked out of the way of his own power.

Enough was enough. She pressed harder on the power switch, felt the device warm to levels that would burn most people in her hand. The light around the whirling buzzsaw grew blinding, started jumping from where it was contained on the blade to the ground and to, really, anything even remotely metal. The entire thing began to rattle in her grip, an early warning sign that she was pushing the limits of its capabilities.

Ducking forward, she dove low, dropping nearly to the point where her stomach hit the ground. Metallo ignored her, pulling his chest back as he prepared to take another shot at the president, now that she was out of the way. But she rammed her speed forward, closed the distance, and emerged in front of him up from the ground just as he released.

She caught the beam with her own chest, and this time she really did feel it. It burned against her skin, like a raw sunburn, like being exposed to small amounts of acid. The pain was a lot, but it didn’t phase her, and without any further hesitation, she drew her arm back, and then swung _down_.

The axe met his core, sliced right through it as every last bit of electricity promptly found its new home in his metallic body. He screamed, the beam flickering and dying entirely as Addy’s feet met the floor, his cybernetics sparking wildly, core leaking an odd, blood-like fluid that stained the part of his shirt that wasn’t already ripped away. He slumped, then, dropping to the ground, and she reached down, breaking through the shielding with a touch of her hand, just to double-check he was alive.

Which he was, thankfully. If a bit worse-for-wear, considering how much damage she’d just done to his nerves. Ah, well. He’d recover, eventually. She pulsed her own power into his brain to shove him into a coma for the time being, just so he wouldn’t wake up at an inopportune time.

“Metallo down,” she said into her mic, rising back up from her crouch and letting her buzzsaw slow down, the whine of electricity fading as it went inert, and then promptly began to fall apart in her grip. “I need a team to come and pick him up for medical evacuation.”

A chorus of affirmatives came in response, and Addy turned away, catching sight of the president. They shared a look, the president looking a bit like she’d just nearly died, which was true. Still, her mental state could be seen to by professionals, or herself if it came down to it, and Addy marched ahead and passed her to check on the ongoing fight.

Outside, the world was quite literally on fire. The concrete burned, other buildings burned, and J’onn had retreated from the fire, not unexpectedly, considering his species. Kara came down on the Infernian, who was still visible, from above, driving her into the ground with both arms. They grappled with one another for a time, but between the dents and tears all along the Infernian’s power armour, it wasn’t able to hold up. Kara’s fingers tore through the metal like tissue paper, ripping it aside as she reached out to do the same to her helmet.

Even from a distance, it was abundantly clear something awful had been done to the Infernian. The face was gaunt, quite literally tortured, with incision marks all along her cheekbones. One of her eyes had been replaced by a cybernetic one, which didn’t seem to be entirely in her control, if the way it was spinning in its socket was any indication. Her skin was a sickly pallor, and old scars seemed to be prone to peeling open.

The Infernian thrashed, screaming loudly, audible over Kara’s earpiece. At first, Addy was of the opinion that it was because she was losing, and didn’t want to.

Then the cracks appeared. Across her skin, across her body, even across the power armour; like spiderwebs in the earth’s mantle, cracks opened up to show blinding orange and yellow heat. The Infernian’s eyes snapped to Kara for a moment as her struggles died out, wild and crazed.

“ _This is why I will never trust this government_ ,” the Infernian said, again picked up over Kara’s earpiece. Her voice was hoarse, rough, like it had gone without use for months. Maybe it had.

The cracks grew wider, larger, and her mouth opened in a silent scream.

“Run!” Kara screamed, loud enough that Addy could pick it up even without the earpiece.

Addy turned, reaching out with her prosthetic to draw her cloak out and around, putting her body between the glowing Infernian and the president. Marsdin stared up at her, confused, before, from behind, the Infernian detonated.

Addy’s feet caught on the ground, skid harshly as her body bumped unpleasantly into the president, who yelped and latched onto her like a limpet. She felt the heat shower across her back, as though someone had just pressed a massive light bulb to her skin, where you could feel it, but not quite be hurt by it, before it all died down.

Turning back around, Addy watched J’onn flicker back into being from a fuzzy red figure, and Kara pick herself out of a wall that she’d been thrown into. Red rained from up above, gore spattering onto concrete as the crater where the Infernian had once been hissed and bubbled with heat. Other shrapnel began to fall, then, glass and metal and other sharp bits clattering onto the ground in a scattering of rain.

“ _...The Infernian has been neutralized,_ ” J’onn’s voice said, over the line, tired and weary. “ _Agents, reconvene. We have prisoners to move and a site to investigate._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got this one out! I still really struggle with fight scenes some times, but this had to be wrapped up and so I powered through it. I hope what's there works! Enjoy.


	40. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets crunkt.

Kara’s costume hung from the back of the door, freshly washed if still a bit damp. Little droplets of water collected around the skirt and fell into the strategically placed bucket below, into the small puddle. Normally, that would’ve been accompanied by the delightful _ping_ of water meeting water, the wobbly sound of liquid, but unfortunately for her, the opposite was true.

Barenaked Ladies, an apparent favourite of the Danvers’ household, blared without irony from the television, cranked up high enough that it could almost, but not quite, overwhelm the sound of Kara singing along with it, surprisingly on-tune all things considered. She was in where the coffee table normally was - but was currently shoved up against one of the walls - and was using the handle-end of a mop as a makeshift microphone as she sang along.

The windows were all open, undoubtedly broadcasting the raw extent of Kara’s passion for a band that had fallen out of relevance as quickly as it had risen to it - which was to say, _very quickly_ \- and the fact that she had gotten side-tracked during her cleaning ritual once more.

Cleaning days were not something Addy was allowed to partake in, as it happened. She had, in good faith, offered her services to sweep the room clean of any pests, dirt, or grime, and upon being asked to clarify _how_ , had been permanently banned from offering aid on anything cleaning related. She wasn’t really sure why, even to this day, it wasn’t like the bugs would be _dirty_ \- she wasn’t so crass - but the judgement had stuck, especially after she had raised the issue with Alex, who had gone against logic and agreed with Kara on the matter.

Rather than cutting back on cleaning time from a few hours to maybe fifteen minutes at the very most, she was instead largely contained to the one chair Kara hadn’t moved off to the side. She sat, cross-legged, with her laptop perched on her thighs, her newest project, as aided by June, spread across her screen.

She was teaching a simple intelligence to differentiate ducks from geese. One she had built herself, with lots of help from June in getting her started, but ultimately after she had begun understanding the logical loops basic patterned artificial intelligences went through, it hadn’t been particularly hard to use her own knowledge to start making simple deductions from then on.

Why ducks and geese, exactly? That came more back to semantics. It had occurred to her, perhaps understandably, that the only type of goose most people recognized was the _Canadian_ goose. Most of them did not even know that geese came in plenty of other colorations, and some that even looked remarkably similar - if not exactly _identical_ \- to ducks and other waterfowl, such as swans. It didn’t help that, as with geese, ducks and other birds had a rather large variety of potential shapes, sizes, and coloration to work from, thereby complicating the matter depending on who and where you learned about geese.

So she was going to remedy that, and use this exact program as a shorthand to prove that people were wrong. She had also been working on a rudimentary Twitter bot to hopefully make this entire process automated, though working around the anti-spam features of the website was tedious if not particularly difficult.

“Woah! I thought I lost this completely!”

Turning her head towards Kara’s voice, Addy watched as the woman in question hefted what looked like a messenger bag that had been violently assaulted by a bedazzler of some kind. The shimmering surface, split up into endless rows of what looked like fake rhinestones, was interesting visually, but even with her own tastes being as they were, seemed a bit... _garish_. Unnecessarily accessorized, perhaps.

Kara, however, quickly lost interest in the bag, let the dresser she had been lifting up tip back down onto four legs, and tossed it onto the pile on her bed that amounted to the rest of her discoveries. In the hour since Kara had started cleaning she had found, in no particular order: a stuffed rendition of Abraham Lincoln which appeared as though it had been dropped into a coal mine, two identical dresses with the exact same stain in the exact same place, which had been hurriedly shoved into place with a muttered _nobody ever tells you spaghetti is so messy_ , a diamond the size of a fist that Kara had stared at for about five minutes before, silently, placing it in the sink, and what appeared to be a very old cookbook written in Classical Tibetan.

Suffice to say, a good deep-cleaning was certainly _due_ for the apartment, but the way she was going about it was leaving something to be desired.

Without much forewarning, her phone started to buzz, drawing Addy’s gaze away from Kara’s continued blitz around the house with a soapy mop. She reached out, took the phone up in her hand, and unlocked her screen with the quick tap of her short, 12-character long password.

A text from Carol. Huh.

_Carol: Hey Addy! Been a while. I’m texting to invite you down to Al’s this evening to celebrate the passing of the law. I know that it’s been a day since it actually became official, but understandably most of us are fairly wary of things going badly, and we were basically almost right anyway? No pressure, it’s just been a while since we’ve last seen one another, and I think it’d be nice to see you around more often. If you do, come around at about 6:30-7:00PM._

_p.s. You can bring along a friend. Even a human. Just let them know it’s going to be a lot of aliens._

Addy blinked once, then twice; tilted her head to one side, just to think about the offer. There _was_ truth in that comment, she had been rather absent from Carol’s life since she’d acquired her new job, and Carol herself had gotten more occupied by Koriand’r. It also hadn’t helped that, with everything going on, she hadn’t really given the bar much of a thought.

Still, the opportunity _was_ there, and it would be something to do, at least. The D.E.O. was currently on standby, sure, but it had given both herself and Kara the next couple of days off—thus the reason why she actually had the time to clean her suit, as it apparently was made out of materials that needed very specific soaps and conditions to not completely ruin.

Speaking of, actually. “Kara?”

Kara turned her way, reaching out to snag the remote from the foot of her bed and point it at the television. Blessedly, the sound of _One Week_ by the Barenaked Ladies dropped from a shout to more of a murmur. “What’s up, Ads?”

“I am intending to go someplace tonight,” she began, watching Kara bob her head along in a nod. “It’s a celebration, among friends, due to the passing of the Alien Amnesty Act. I was wondering if you would like to tag along?”

Kara stared at her for a few moments before, with another press of the button, muting the television entirely. “Is it the bar?” she asked, apparently quicker on the uptake this time around.

She nodded. “Going with me would likely mean outing yourself as an alien, if not necessarily Supergirl. There will be many aliens there who do not require sudden arrests, even if they may be doing something less than legal, such as imbibing alcohol which has not, technically, passed the food safety review boards.”

That, again, got her another blank stare. For a while, Kara just kinda looked at her, eyes a bit distant as she gave it all a good thought. That was one of the better things about Kara, she might be impulsive in situations that called for it, but would always ultimately try to think it through when she was asked about things, or requested to do something. It was a good trait, one that would’ve given rise to a very level-headed person, had it not been somewhat undercut by her temper and impulsiveness.

“Can’t I just pretend to be your human friend or something?” Kara asked at last, blinking out of her thoughtful stupor, eyes refocusing more directly on her.

“There will be telepathic people there who are used to sensing people by proximity, you will be fairly blatant when it becomes clear they cannot sense you,” Addy pointed out.

“Well, okay, that makes sense,” Kara said, trailing off a bit. She glanced around for a few seconds, before leaning over to prop the mop up against the wall next to her, gently walking over so that she could stand across from Addy, looking a bit ridiculous, surrounded by piles of furniture and whatnot. “Is it safe? I haven’t really—you know, _gone_ there before. Not that I’m stereotyping or anything, just, superpowers and rowdiness don’t make a good pair.”

“It’s as safe as any other bar which mostly caters to those in the lower strata of wealth and morals,” she pointed out, because it was mostly _true_. “Humans carry firearms, such as guns, and I cannot see how those are any more threatening than someone who can make you combust. I am immune to both of those things.”

“...We’re not immune to _everything_ , Ads,” Kara stressed, a touch testily.

“No, just the _majority_ of things,” Addy countered. “And as a direct consequence, that makes me fairly safe in most situations not involving kryptonite.”

Kara opened her mouth, evidently about to rebuff _that_ , but ultimately shut it. That, evidently, meant she was clearly right, and she was glad Kara was finally starting to see her way.

“You don’t have to, I was just informed that I had been neglecting another friend of mine more recently, and figured it would be expedient to see them now.” Carol had extended an olive branch of something like friendship, first and foremost, and ultimately Addy felt she had to repay that in some way. Even if it wasn’t so cut and dry as she might prefer it to be. Emotions were always so messy.

“Y’know what?” Kara started again, at last. “I think I will. I’m on break, I haven’t really had a chance to try to—well, _connect_ with aliens, mostly because I didn’t know most of them had communities like that on Earth. Why not enjoy myself?”

* * *

Late evening came with a dusky sort of sky. The overcast of the last few days - already a fairly rare occurrence in California, by her estimate - had cleared up, leaving the skies vacant and empty, letting all the colours of the setting sun wash across it like a canvas. Dark oranges made up most of the sky, transitioning into colder purples and, eventually, full night, the further one got away from the sunset proper.

Turning the corner, Addy stepped into the alleyway leading up to Al’s entrance, Kara keeping pace behind her. The alleyway was, unsurprisingly, fairly packed, just not with the normal human-passing affair. Aliens of all shapes, sizes, and colorations stood around in mixed groups, milling casually, with a sort of flair that felt somewhat ill-fitting for a place so hidden and out-of-the-way as Al’s. Al’s normal collection of aliens were, yes, those who couldn’t conventionally pass, but generally, most people wore concealment tech or came in from odd and hard-to-spot angles, such as from the rooftop, and few would run the risk of being spotted outside by someone.

It was a change, yes, but not necessarily a bad one.

There were still _some_ humans around, or at least some people who resembled them closely enough. A small group of close-shaved - both in head and beard - men stood around a rather large pick-up truck of some kind, chatting among themselves in the lot just next to the alley, while a handful of human regulars stood closer into the crowd, chatting amicably with an eight-foot, green-scaled quadrupedal alien, who spoke in a rather thick Glaswegian accent.

Bypassing them wasn’t going to be an issue, though making sure Kara didn’t get sidetracked might be. Addy looked back, catching sight of Kara’s eyes flicking between every alien present with a rather awe-struck look, though whatever else she might be feeling, Addy couldn’t read. Kara had come, at her recommendation, in casual wear - she had initially wanted to wear a dress, and... you don’t do that at Al’s, it would be like wearing a dress to a recycling plant - which in this case amounted to a button-up flannel shirt, with sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and some roughed-up jeans and high tops. Her hair was, as usual, pulled back into a tight ponytail at the top of her skull, and her glasses were perched carefully on her face.

“Don’t get distracted,” Addy said, pitching her voice high enough to carry over the muted sound of conversation. Some people gave her a look, but either recognized her or didn’t care to snap at her, and looked away not long after.

Kara’s eyes drifted back to her, and she offered up a shaky, somewhat awkward smile. “Sorry, been a while since I’ve seen something like this. Last time was when I went to Starhaven, with my father.”

Oh, memories. Addy could relate to that. She nodded, saying nothing more, and went back to weaving her way through the various crowds of people, listening for Kara’s footsteps as she kept close behind. There wasn’t a line when she arrived at the door, though more than a few people were milling next to it, not that she gave them much of a look before she walked up and rapped her knuckles three times against the door.

The slot opened, a familiar pair of gimlet eyes staring down at her. “Password?” Gregor, the doorman, less said, and more grunted.

“Pineapple juice,” Addy recited back.

The slot latched shut, and the door, accordingly, was yanked open, Gregor keeping off to the side as he waved them through.

If the alleyway outside was packed and full of aliens, the interior of Al’s was completely overwhelmed by them. Addy herself hadn’t ever seen so many different types of aliens in one place before, in large part because they normally didn’t come all at once. People forgot about it sometimes, but Earth’s twenty-four-hour day-night cycle was not a galaxy standard. Nothing was. Home planets could have day-night cycles that ranged from equivalent to days on this one, to hours. Some didn’t have them at all, even, in the case of tidally locked planets.

Altogether, that meant that most people had times they were predisposed towards going to a seedy, fairly dirty dive-bar, and would come in cycles. All of this was further complicated by planets that only abstractly had day periods, and aliens that were nocturnal or diurnal, or might otherwise have a different understanding of the passage of time.

Suffice to say, this was fairly unfamiliar.

It was noisy, to boot. The low murmur of conversation outside was far eclipsed by the dull _roar_ of conversation on the inside. She wasn’t a particular fan of it, but she could endure.

Peeking back behind her shoulder, just to be sure Kara wasn’t getting lost again - and, thankfully, she wasn’t; she looked about as shocked as Addy did, all things considered - Addy paced further into the bar. Most of the seats were already taken, including the one she usually sat at with Carol, but they’d figure out the seating arrangement later. The bar itself, as she grew nearer, was crowded as well, all the seats already packed with people wedged between them, grabbing their drinks or snacks and then departing, only for the seats to be quickly taken up by someone else.

The dull roar of the area grew to a fevered pitch as chatter rippled across the area, drowning out anything she could otherwise decipher from nearby conversations. After a few seconds of awkward, stifled standing-in-place, it receded again, back down to the point where Addy could decently manage to make out a word or two if it was shouted in her direction from at most five feet away.

A pair of seats opened up at just the right time, too, and Addy was waving Kara forward and taking up one of them before they could be stolen away again, slotting herself up onto the raised cushion and watching Kara do the same.

Megan, among the crowd of busy bartenders, broke away, a smile on her face as she wandered up and towards them. “Been a while!” She shouted as she neared, just barely audible as the noise grew and receded like some sort of torturous tide of sound. “Who’s this with you?”

“Megan, this is my roommate and friend, Kara,” Addy introduced, politely, pointing them at one another. Megan reached forward with one hand, and Kara took it, a firm handshake exchanged between the two of them.

Once their hands parted, Megan turned her focus back to Addy. “So, what do you guys feel like having?”

Addy looked towards Kara, rather than Megan, for the time being. She already knew what she was having - not alcohol, was what - and it mostly came down to what Kara felt she wanted.

Kara, to her credit, picked up on her silence quick enough, making a low humming noise in the back of her throat. “What do you have on special?”

Megan nodded, then looked her way. “You want your regular?”

She just nodded, not wanting to fight for prominence among the tide of noise.

Kara turned, staring at her. “You have a _regular?_ ”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Megan wave down one of the local K’ol. K’ol were blue-skinned, approximately humanoid aliens, roughly about the same height as humans, just with a head that was more horizontal than it was vertical. They bore a slight resemblance to the alien from the movie of the same name, in terms of head shape anyway. The particular K’ol she was waving down was one Addy actually knew—Itnar, the guy who normally made her drinks for her.

As Itnar approached, his body shimmered slightly with fog where the air met his skin, not that he showed much. He was, paradoxical to the heat of a Californian summer, fully bundled up in layers of clothes to retain heat.

“Another drink for Addy!” Megan yelled towards him, Itnar nodding in turn as she looked away, walking towards the wall of alcoholic bottles lining the shelves.

Itnar wandered roughly in Megan’s direction, only stopping to swipe a cup from the bar and hold it under the faucet, filling it half-way. Once that was done, he turned back to Addy, his face splitting into a bit of a smile as his hand started to glow. The water inside rapidly froze over, coating the glass in a layer of fog, and then twisted his other hand with a jerk. The ice inside cracked, then shredded under his telekinetic control—another part of the K’ol’s abilities. Natural cryokinetics, but with some telekinetic abilities on things that were cold enough. The only problem was that if they grew too cold themselves - more than they already were, anyway - they’d die, which meant they mostly found homes on desert planets, or the places you’d be least likely to actually find water in the first place.

Itnar stepped forward with that done, placing the glass down on the table.

“Thank you,” she said, and got another smile in turn.

“No problem.” Itnar’s voice was low, a gravelly sort of thing that reflected on what was likely a less-than-human voice box. It sounded an awful lot like something mechanical or fake, synthesized. “I’m just glad I can do things such as these, domesticity suits me, I believe.”

It did, too. The thing about the K’ol, and why Addy only knew one - Itnar - and had learned most of what they were from him after spotting him freezing the air into intricate, if fragile ice sculptures, was that most of them were mercenaries. In a rather stark contrast to humans, the K’ol had sent their planet into a global ice-age due to disrupting certain parts of the environment and tectonic movement, and the diaspora had killed most, and the ones who hadn’t died had picked up fighting as it was generally the thing they were the best at.

The thing was, as far as Addy could tell, that wasn’t even particularly rare for aliens. Ecosystems and, more generally, climate, were terribly fragile things, and most alien societies dealt with the same hurdles that humans had to, and responded to it in roughly the same way that humans had: by screwing it up. The ones who didn’t tend to end up being interplanetary empires by the end of it, and they weren’t exactly relevant, considering how rural Earth was by both her own map of species her kind had visited, and by what Carol had told her about intergalactic diplomacy.

Bringing her glass of ice up to her mouth and ignoring the odd look Kara was shooting her, Addy shovelled some of the partially-shredded ice in, catching a big chunk between her teeth and crunching it.

Megan arrived back seconds later, waving Itnar off with one of her bottle-carrying hands. She turned towards them both, smiling gently, and raised the two bottles she had on offer, placing them down in front of Kara. She opened her mouth, and was thereafter promptly overwhelmed in volume by the tide of aliens in the bar once again.

After waiting patiently for it to fade off a few seconds later, Megan started talking again.

“The one on the right is Sorkanth Cider,” Megan explained as loudly as she could, motioning towards it. The bottle itself was full of dark, rich amber fluid, and the bottle was shaped to almost be twisted or braided, a rather impressive act of glassworking. Motioning to her left, towards a more traditional rum-bottle-shaped bottle, which was full of a pastel-green fluid, with a tag covered in alien sigils that Addy couldn’t read. “The one on the left is Morath Pale. Sorkanth Cider is, well, _cider_ might not be the best word for it, it’s just the closest English has, as it’s technically made from an apple-shaped fruit from Omitax, and it’s technically fermented in the same way, but it’s heavy-duty stuff. Really potent. Morath Pale is a type of booze, or well, _pale_ is a type of booze, brewed from Hydraxis hops, or the equivalent and—look, English is really restrictive. Moranth Pale is pretty fruity, like bananas, and a bit less heavy on alcohol. Sorkanth is much harder, but you know, I’m fairly certain you can...”

Megan trailed off, and Addy looked towards Kara, just to see why. Kara was staring at the bottle of cider with a lost look, something terribly distant in her eyes, like she wasn’t entirely present.

Megan went quiet, and Addy couldn’t find it in herself to say anything either.

A few more moments passed, and Kara’s throat visibly worked in a swallow. “My father... he used to drink this,” she explained, haltingly. “Kept it up on the high shelf because I always wanted to drink it, said we would share some when I came of age. I never really thought I’d see it again.”

Megan’s face, across from her, softened into something sympathetic and terribly, terribly warm. She pushed the bottle over with a smile. “It’s on me, in that case. Don’t worry. But drink it slowly, regardless of whatever species you might be, that’s more equivalent to the human understanding of Vodka than it is actual cider.”

Kara’s head whipped up, an affronted look on her face. “I—you don’t have—but, _slow_? I can hold my liquor.”

“This isn’t just liquor, this technically qualifies as a lethal poison for humans.”

Kara’s mouth pinched, drew in, and she considered for a moment. “...I’ll have a glass?”

Megan smiled, wider this time, sweeping both bottles away. “A glass you’ll have, in that case.” She turned, handing the Morath Pale off to Itnar, who was quick to shuffle the bottle back into the rows of similar bottles slotted into the wall, before swiping a tall glass from the same place Itnar had sourced his and popping the cork off of the cider. She took a moment to let the bubbling die down before pouring it casually into it, filling it up to the brim and taking out a meaningful chunk of the bottle.

Turning back around, she placed it on the bar, sliding it closer to Kara. “Enjoy.” 

The look on Kara’s face, by comparison, was something like confusion. Like she wasn’t particularly sure what she should be feeling right now, a sensation Addy could eminently relate to. She felt like that a lot, honestly.

“Are you okay?”

Kara turned to look at her, reaching out to take the glass into her hands. She smiled, but only a little, the sort of restrained smile that she got when she was worried about something. “Sorry, I just... never thought I’d get to try it. The smell is still so familiar, so is the look of it. I always wanted to try some, and I guess I can, now.”

Interested in the smell, Addy leaned away from her cup and towards Kara’s, taking a bit of a whiff. It was, completely, alien, like nothing she’d ever smelled on Earth. The closest comparison she could find in her brain were some of those berries, Taylor’s memories had called them snake berries, with a sort of fruity, chemical-y tang to them that made most kids shy away from them. Perhaps rightfully, considering that they weren’t smart to eat.

Maybe it showed on her face how little she actually liked the smell, because Kara’s laugh rang like a bell, if a bit of a jagged one.

“I guess I’ll try it now, though,” Kara said, her laugh dying off into something quiet and uncomfortable.

Addy blinked. “You don’t have to.” It felt obvious to say, but maybe it hadn’t occurred to Kara.

“Yeah, I know.” Kara looked at her, then, much closer than she had since they’d arrived at the bar. Her smile turned softer, a bit more sure of itself. “But I think I deserve it for once.”

Kara swivelled, then, turning around in her seat with glass in hand and staring out into the crowd. Addy did much the same, pausing only to watch Kara shove her glasses a bit further down to her face and squint into the crowd, using her enhanced vision. After a moment, she adjusted her glasses again, and pointed off into the depths of the crowd, to a spot roughly next to the door. “Behind that one.”

Addy nodded, dropping from her seat, with Kara doing much the same. Weaving through the crowds was, again, not the most pleasant thing, but they made good time by side-stepping a particularly rowdy bit of singing in a language Addy had never heard before, mostly led by a pair of gigantic, semi-translucent aliens, whose body had developed a scattering of shell-like growths across their more vital regions.

True to her word, the table they eventually ended up at was empty. A bit stained by something unspecified, and with two too many chairs for its size, but certainly workable.

Addy plopped down into one seat, dragging another chunk of frozen ice to be obliterated between her teeth, while Kara took up the one just next to her, setting her glass down and staring at it.

Then, with great care and focus, she lifted it, tipped it back, and brought it to her lips.

Kara lasted exactly one sip. The glass was back on the table quicker than what was possible, and Kara was coughing, waving a hand near her mouth. “No, no, I totally get what she and my dad meant now,” she said, or maybe rambled, eyes screwed up as her breathing finally evened out. “That is a _lot_ of alcohol. Yikes.”

Which, well. What did she expect? Part of the reason why she didn’t partake in liquor was because of its taste. Well, that and the inebriation, which had always seemed rather unpleasant for both the person inebriated and everyone around them. To prove a point, she slotted another chip of ice between her teeth and crunched away.

Kara, however, was not one to be deterred, bringing her glass back up to her lips to take another sip, this time with significantly more grace. She winced, still, and looked like she’d rather be drinking water from a muddy puddle, but ultimately managed to get a swig down. “Rao that—that just _burns_ , it just tastes like a burn. It’s like drinking gasoline.”

Addy was, frankly, not about to ask how she knew what gasoline tasted like. 

Rather than that, she glanced around, hoping to find Carol. This time, too, it wouldn’t even be that hard to spot her among the crowd; most of them had foregone tech to hide their alien natures, and as a result, a short, twenty-something looking woman with reddish hair would look almost comically out of place.

Which, admittedly, was why she spotted Alex so quickly. Even locked eyes with her when it clicked that she was not looking at a random civilian, but rather Alex Danvers.

Alex Danvers, who was looking at them with something between horror and embarrassment on her face. Who was being accompanied by Maggie Sawyer, next to her, staring just as openly as Alex was.

“Kara,” Addy said.

Kara, mid-sip - and why she was still drinking when it apparently sucked so much, she did _not_ know - turned to look at her.

Addy merely gestured towards Alex, Kara’s eyes following the motion.

She swallowed, roughly, and promptly started to choke.

Alex rushed over, Maggie on her heels with a bit of a confident swagger to her step, and arrived at Kara’s side in record time. She reeled back and applied two solid claps to Kara’s back before, with a guttered gasp for breath, Kara managed to actually swallow the contents of her drink, if at the predictable cost of the burn nearly driving her to tears.

“What are you doing here?!” Alex hissed thunderously, glaring daggers.

Kara flushed blotchily, certainly not helped by the tinge of tears at the corners of her eyes, which she quickly reached up to wipe away. “Addy invited me!”

Alex’s head whipped back around to her, staring mutinously.

Not one to take threats sitting down, Addy crunched on another bit of ice. Alex grimaced, for whatever reason, at the sound of it. “Carol invited me, and I invited Kara.”

“It could give away her identity!” Alex shot back, voice still a low hiss.

She just stared at her, because obviously? “Just that she is an alien.”

“But if people know that she’s an alien—”

“Nothing bad can happen anymore,” Maggie interrupted, stepping closer. She reached over to clap Alex on the shoulder, who jerked a bit beneath the touch, but tellingly didn’t move away from it. “It’s legal to be an alien in America now, remember.”

Alex tensed, relaxed, tensed _again_ , then finally relaxed. She still seemed bristly, like a cat who you had recently offended, but was no longer about to lash out at something or someone, thankfully.

“...I suppose, but it was _still_ a bad idea—”

“Yeah, well!” Kara interrupted, throwing her hands up, her glass left on the table. “Maybe I wanted to see Addy’s friends! And anyway, why are _you_ here?”

“Don’t turn this back onto me!” Alex nearly shrieked, sounding utterly affronted by the notion.

“I invited her,” Maggie, again, interrupted, preventing the back-and-forth from escalating. She had a softer smile on her face as she looked between Alex and Kara. “I wanted her to see what aliens could be like in a more communal setting, something more celebratory and happy. I doubt she gets many other chances to be around aliens in non-combat situations in the first place.”

Addy took Alex in, then, and found something curious. Alex _did_ look surprisingly relaxed, despite the bulk sum of her interaction with aliens being generally violent or unpleasant. She was wearing her casual clothes, yes, but a bit more put-together than they were during game nights. She also had make-up on, something she was fairly certain Alex didn’t particularly pay much attention to by virtue of it being a hassle to do.

She had, evidently, made herself rather quite presentable. Almost a bit too much, considering the clientele of Al’s.

Addy took another bite of her ice.

Alex, apparently seeing no path to victory in this situation, merely turned to Maggie and sighed. The sort of exhausted, but ultimately accepting sigh of someone who knew they had lost the fight, and would have to make preparations to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. To whatever ends that might be, Alex chose the first step on that path by slumping a bit bonelessly down in her seat.

Maggie made an undignified snort at that, and took up the one just next to Alex, leaving the table half full. She turned, away from Alex and Kara staring at one another, and towards her, propping her chin up beneath her heel, and opening her mouth.

The roar of the crowd rather promptly drowned out whatever she was saying. A frustrated look prickled across her face as the group waited it out, this time lasting five seconds and approximately four more seconds than it had any right to.

“So,” Maggie said at last, regaining her momentum. “I _knew_ that I had seen you before. You hang out around Carol and Megan, right? Sometimes with that new girl—Kodi?”

“Koriand’r,” Addy corrected, raising her voice.

“There you are!”

Addy turned, startled by the new voice, to find, as though summoned by name alone, Carol and Koriand’r squeezing their way through the crowd. The two of them looked in good spirits, and Carol wasn’t in her uniform that she normally wore when tending to the bar, which meant she wasn’t obligated to work today. That was nice.

“...with Officer Sawyer and two people I don’t know,” Carol finished, a bit haltingly.

“Carol,” Addy began, if only to get this out of the way. “This is Kara and Alex, they are my family.”

Carol glanced between the two of them, then back towards Maggie. “And Sawyer?”

“She was the one who invited Alex.”

“Good to see you too, Carol,” Maggie drawled, something in her voice that made Addy want to keep a healthy distance from the two of them. It was vaguely annoying in inflection, like she was intending to rile Carol up.

Carol, meanwhile, outright ignored her, turning her focus entirely back onto Addy. “Sorry about taking so long, I was a bit preoccupied when you arrived. Some guys outside are being difficult.”

However, as Maggie was not one to be ignored, she evidently took that as a challenge. “You know, none of you are particularly bucking the stereotype about psychic people and cliques.”

Alex choked on either air or spit, Addy wasn’t about to check, and Carol merely sighed, rolling her eyes until they landed on Maggie’s person with a loose, annoyed sort of stare.

“Does _everyone_ know you’re psychic?!” Alex hissed across the table, Maggie having given new life to a torch she had been responsible for putting out in the first place.

Carol turned her gaze onto Alex, looked at her a bit oddly. “It’s... not something she can exactly keep a secret, Alex.”

Alex just stared back.

Carol, evidently seeing a discussion as necessary, motioned towards Koriand’r before taking a seat, Koriand’r taking up one of the few remaining ones next to her. She shuffled in closer, propping her elbow up on the table, and turning her entire focus onto Alex, who seemed to almost squirm beneath it in discomfort.

“Addy’s a bit like... well, hard to miss if you’re aware of her. You know how it’s not like, an actual physical thing that stops you from seeing the stars during the day? Just that it’s the light pollution of the sun that makes them impossible to make out? It’s a lot like that. Her psychic presence is so loud and vast that it’s hard not to notice her, even miles away.”

...That was _certainly news to her_. Why, exactly, had nobody informed her? At least _J’onn_ could’ve, he was certainly psychic enough to be able to check.

“I will have to find a way to hide that,” she said, at last, getting the words out being a bit harder this time around.

“You wouldn’t be the first to want to, but nobody else even remotely on your level has found out how to,” Carol explained, not unkindly, not that it lessened the blow any. “Most of the time it results in their head exploding. Or worse.”

She wasn’t particularly sure how one could experience something worse than an exploding head.

“And, wait, there’s a stereotype about psychics gravitating towards one another?” Alex cut in, sounding almost curious, but tentatively so.

Carol turned to look at her, pursing her lips in a way Addy had come to associate with her being about to say something she either disagreed with or would prefer not to be addressing. “Most telepathic and psychic species have their abilities as a product of some primary need for them. Whether it’s transferring information between different members of the species, or more along the lines of being able to project emotions as a way to inform others that something has gone wrong. But a lot of those... they came with a cultural habit of these species finding communal uses for them, things they could use to share amongst themselves.”

Everyone had gone quiet as Carol spoke, even Kara, who was looking on curiously, if not particularly like she was learning. Did she already know about this? Kara had said she’d done rigorous study as a child on Krypton, and Addy was starting to wonder how far that went.

“In some cases, it’s very... personal. Martians, as an example, used their psychic abilities to hunt, yes, but they also used them to share memories, entire life experiences, between each other as a sign of trust. Over time, a lot of those species tend to genetically trend towards the abilities only really being used for that purpose as the civilizations they build begin to become agricultural. It helps that most of them have been without the actual need to hunt for tens of thousands of years.

“As a direct consequence of all that, people with psychic abilities tend to associate said abilities with... home, community, culture, that sort of thing, and it’s easier for them to communicate and feel comfortable around other people with similar abilities. Admittedly, Addy doesn’t really _do_ that latter part, she’s honestly very powerful in psychic projection but, as far as I can tell, only somewhat powerful in psychic _sensitivity_ , but it’s still hard not to notice her and feel, well, kinda safe.”

Everyone was looking at her, and now she felt rather mightily uncomfortable.

Kara, off to the side, finished off her glass with a final grimace, placing the slightly foamy cup back down on the table, apparently now fully done with that life experience.

“I still intend to find a way to hide my presence,” Addy picked up, at last, because they ought to know. “If it’s the case that everyone can feel it, and have ultimately merely decided _not to inform me_ , it’s giving those who may act against me an unfair advantage. I will fix that.”

“...I’m fairly certain the only unfair advantage is how powerful you are,” Carol said, a bit dryly.

Addy squinted at her, annoyance pulsing. “There is nothing unfair about that, it’s not my fault others aren’t up to my levels of power.”

Carol opened her mouth to say something, but was once more drowned out by a sudden change in volume by the crowd. Just, rather than petering off, it grew. Louder and louder, until it felt like everyone was shouting, and showed little to no sign of stopping.

A raw, dull pulse of pain started to prickle along her senses, the early onset of a headache. Wonderful.

The noise grew more frantic, louder, and Addy just about felt her patience snap.

She glanced around, trying to find the source of the commotion, and found that most of the aliens were now looking out the entrance. Rising from her seat, and knowing better than to try to speak, she stared down the wall of aliens, who would be unlikely to budge, calculated the odds, and lifted off into the air, more or less completely done with the ongoing situation.

Kara and Alex shouted something she couldn’t make out, though it sounded fairly aggrieved. She ignored them, otherwise, drifting over the crowd, ignoring the occasional scowl sent her way, and slipped through the open door to the bar, arriving out into the nighttime air, the loudness dying out now that the sound wasn’t trapped completely within a small dive bar.

The space outside of the bar was much more packed than it was before, and not in a good way. The crowds of aliens were tumultuous, angry, and she could see why. At the far end of the alley were those same men she’d seen, all close-shaved, but now wearing full military gear—bulletproof vests and the like—as well as carrying alien guns. Obviously alien, at that, ones which had strips of glowing lights along their side, a bit utilitarian in construction, but ultimately obvious in purpose: combat. They were, rather conveniently, arrayed in a line, barring off the one conventional exit to the alley that led to Al’s, keeping all the aliens packed inside and unable to functionally leave the alley.

Flying in a bit closer, but not so close that the people with the guns would get any moronic ideas, Addy let her feet touch down on asphalt and strode up closer. She was barely a few paces away when she heard it.

“We’re just here to keep the peace,” one of the guys was saying, his expression hidden behind a riot police-style helmet.

“Yeah,” another one added. “We’re concerned members of the community, and we just want to make sure nothing untoward happens.”

She didn’t even need to be all that great at understanding tone to realize how transparently full of shit it was.

The aliens weren’t buying it either, evidently. There were about three aliens to one human, and most of them had long since lost their own patience. Whether it be because they were drunk - likely - confident - even more so - or deeply frustrated - almost impossible not to be - they had long since given up even the delusion of playing along. Many of them crackled with energy, fingers of light flickering along their person, while others with less energy-based abilities had started to pull themselves up to their full heights, towering imperiously over the squad of barely-six-foot-tall-morons.

“Addy! You can’t just—”

A hand snagged on her sleeve, dragging her back. She turned, caught sight of Alex - the one who had just spoken and grabbed her - while Kara and Koriand’r were standing in the wings, watching. Maggie was there too, though still fighting her way through the crowd at the door to get closer.

“People who frequent here already know that Addy Queen is an alien in some capacity,” Addy explained, tugging her sleeve free. “I opted to fly less rigidly than I normally did, my identity is safe.”

Alex’s eyes widened minutely, but they weren’t looking at her. Rather, she was staring around Addy, off to her left side, and she turned to see what exactly was so interesting about the crowd.

The guy - the leader, by her estimate, considering how he was at the center of the line - had pulled what looked like a laser revolver from its holster, and was jabbing it into the face of a particularly pissed off furred alien, whose teeth had pulled back into a wide snarl of anger.

“Not so tough now, are you? Huh?! Without your freakish bullshit to give you the upper hand, you’re not so strong!”

“Alright!” Maggie’s voice interrupted, and Addy once again swung her head around to spot her. She was stepping forward, an absolutely thunderous look having replaced the soft smile she’d worn until now, marching with certain anger behind each moment. “Cut that shit out, _now!_ ”

She marched right on past them, too, evidently not about to keep to the wings like Kara and Koriand’r. 

The line of militiamen turned to look at her, most of them adopting scowls.

The guy with the revolver, perhaps most of all, just glared at her. “And who the fuck are you, huh?” His gun never wavered, even as he looked away. “What do you have, huh? Eye lasers maybe, like the traitor who nearly killed the president?”

Maggie reached up for her shirt pouch, and that was unfortunately exactly the wrong thing to do.

The guy swivelled, drawing the gun towards Maggie and firing off a shot in an instant. A laser cracked from the barrel, a bright neon-green, and Maggie dropped away from it, barely avoiding it. The laser, instead, carved a bubbling gouge in the asphalt, nearly eight feet in length.

The aliens, most of them probably already aware of who Maggie was, surged in outrage. A burst of frost erupted from the ground, Addy spotting Itnar reaching out, encasing two of the guys with guns in a solid block of ice. Other aliens merely charged, large and heavy, shoving the line back as guys were drawn and pointed. The low hum of energy weapons lit up the street, barrels crackling.

A gunshot blasted into the air, cutting through the din.

It was Maggie, badge held up in one hand and a gun pointed up with the other. “No, I have a fucking _badge_. Get on the ground, or I swear to a god I don’t believe in, we’ll be having words.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on _our_ side?!” The leader spat, wrenching himself free from the grip of that same furred alien, who snarled back at him. “You’re a cop! Why are you standing up for the fucking aliens?!”

“At this very moment?” Maggie said, voice tremulous and barely restrained, anger hot behind each word. “I’m trying to avoid people getting _killed_. Look around you, at the crowd, at _yourself_ , did you really think this night was going to end peacefully? When you’re acting like this? With those weapons?!”

To their credit, the remaining militiamen who weren’t either pinned or frozen did glance around, and started to really realize the situation. Of the maybe ten they had, two of which already out of commission, there was a growing crowd of at least fifty aliens. Of those aliens, a solid three-fourths of them could likely mutilate them with little issue in a variety of horrifying ways, as developed by species living in some of the most foreign and hostile environments in the universe.

Whether they saw the hurt and fear among the aliens, well, Addy didn’t know. But she did.

Still, fear began to flicker over the men's faces at that, and a few even started to stumble backwards, as though they might be able to outrun them.

“Now, get on the ground, and I won’t consider the bullshit you just pulled resisting arrest,” Maggie finished, her voice cooling, but not growing any nicer. It was icier, instead, harsher.

For a moment, Addy really wasn’t sure if they’d accept that ultimatum. The guy with the revolver seemed infuriated by the entire notion, but one of them broke, dropped their weapon, and got down on their stomach. Then another, and then another, and then, finally, the leader stepped away, dropped his guns, and did the same.

“J’onn,” Kara began, voice a bit of a slur. Addy glanced back her way to find Alex holding her up with one arm, visibly straining under the effort.

...Was Kara drunk? Wonderful.

“Is going to be _so_ mmmmaaaaaddd.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! A bit more fluff with some introductions to the focus of the next couple of storylines: alien weaponry and technology being proliferated through human life. Hope you enjoy, and hope you're excited for, well, that.


	41. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy gets involved in illegal arms dealing.

Addy was fairly certain her mental map of the D.E.O. would never grow functionally complete. The hallways all looked the same, the people also looked mostly the same, outside of a select few, and the fact that the place had been seemingly purposefully designed to be as maze-like as possible wasn’t helping anything, for sure.

She hadn’t even really been aware that the D.E.O. _had_ bathrooms. It made sense that it did, with hindsight, but nothing about the place had exactly inspired thoughts that it would adhere to conventional and logical design principles.

Kara’s gagging faded off, to be replaced by a low sob of dread, managing to remain audible despite her being several walls and what she assumed was at least a stall between herself and Kara.

Alex, across from her, looked warily at J’onn. “...What did you even _give_ her?”

J’onn gave her a dry, flat look. “An old remedy parents on Mars would give their drunken teenagers. I don’t know the exact science, however...”

There was another bout of gagging, retching, another wail of misery as Kara babbled about _never doing this again_ and _why did Alex enjoy this so much?!_

“I don’t believe she’ll be remembering this incident very fondly, nonetheless,” he completed, leaning a bit further back against the uniform concrete wall of the hallway.

“I didn’t even know there was something that could affect Kryptonians like this,” Alex said, turning her head towards the shut bathroom door, squinting a bit at it. “Are you sure it’s not poison?”

“It may or may not qualify,” J’onn conceded, diplomatically. “It certainly won’t hurt her, well, not _physically_ —but for your other question: Martians are already fairly resistant to most things, if not as much as Kryptonians. It would appear our remedies, meant to overwhelm those defences, work regardless.”

J’onn’s eyes drifted to her, his face crinkling slightly. “Now, would one of you tell me what happened? I am not about to judge, or even ask questions, about _why_ you were there—what you do in your personal time, so long as it’s sufficiently legal, is out of my hands—but I would enjoy knowing what exactly led to the point of a gunfight with illegal alien weaponry.”

Alex looked at her, inclined her head a little. Ah, so she wanted her to take over, and well, she supposed it would make sense. Alex had only ever gone there twice, she might not understand the politics.

“Kara and I went to the bar to celebrate,” Addy began, glancing worriedly towards the bathroom door as another bout of retching and misery started to echo out from inside. “She got some alien cider, I was given shredded ice. Detective Maggie Sawyer brought Alex along to supposedly get her used to aliens in a non-combat environment, where she was neither expected nor even remotely allowed to draw weapons on them.”

“Hey,” Alex cut in, sounding a touch insulted. “I’m not _that_ bad.”

Addy ignored her.

“I believe the men in militia gear arrived not long after one of my friends did, as the crowd was regularly getting loud in response to something I was unaware of. The men in question came with long, alien rifles, and one had a revolver-shaped laser pistol. Ultimately, it escalated to the point of one of them drawing an alien weapon on a local alien. I was able to witness it by flying over the heads of the crowd, as I was unlikely to manage to physically force my way through without sizable resistance.

“Once Maggie Sawyer saw what was occurring, she attempted to draw her badge from her top pocket, and instead it would appear the militia members saw that as her trying to draw a weapon.” Addy fiddled with her hands, playing with the hem of her shirt. “The aliens mobbed the militia, but Maggie prevented them from being executed by a riotous crowd of people celebrating their freedom, and were now facing down an armed, violent response from people who thought they could exert control over others with weapons when said others are capable of impossibly powerful feats of strength, among other things.”

J’onn stared at her, thinking.

“I thought they were rather stupid to do so,” she appended, because she didn’t want to send out the wrong message. “Had I been in their situation, I would have just planted a bomb.”

Alex shut her eyes, reaching up to rub at them. “You can’t just... say things like that, Addy.”

“I wouldn’t ever do it. All I am saying is that they were outnumbered and vastly outgunned, even if myself and Kara weren’t there. Many of the aliens which work at the bar are there because they’re nearly impossible to kill.”

J’onn sighed, drawing one hand up to rub into the stubble he had across his chin. “I’ve already deployed agents to acquire those weapons, though I doubt it will glean anything new as, if my guess is correct, we likely already have the weapons they were using. More than a few of them, even.”

Addy blinked.

Alex nodded, awkwardly rubbing at her brows. “Yeah, it’s why I was startled to see them. We’ve been finding them in circulation among some of the gangs who hire aliens as of recently, as well as a few idiots who happened to post their lion-hunting expedition photos on Facebook with an alien rifle in sight, anyway.”

“More specifically,” J’onn continued, in Alex’s place. “We will interrogate those who had the weapons, but I doubt we’ll find anything new. This is not the first time since Fort Rozz’s crash that we’ve had alien technology making its way into the hands of those who can pay for it. It occurred in the past, as well; you may not know this, but Earth is fairly remote, and is used by several interstellar syndicates to store troves of technology from peacekeeping forces, among other things, meaning most weaponry that is stored are the sorts of things which are banned by most governments. Those caches sometimes become forgotten, or the people who put them there die, and eventually, they end up being found by humans. We had a case when a man in the Philippines acquired a mutagenic ray weapon, which he used to convert half of his village into a gang of superpowered monsters to try to wrest control away from the local government.”

Alex made a face at that, clearly remembering something she’d rather not. J’onn’s face was a bit grim as well, though it quickly smoothed out into the neutral expression he so often wore.

“But, no, I don’t think this is related to a trove or a cache of weapons being found. I believe that the alien technology can of worms have long since been opened. Just from rudimentary study, it would appear we’re looking at someone who can create, or at least reasonably recreate, alien weapons that they acquired or sourced from Fort Rozz. A lot of the guns are close approximations of the more professional-grade weapons that the prison guards used.” J’onn’s head turned away, and he sighed, long and slow. “Alien technology continues to proliferate, and it’s been difficult to track where it’s coming from, outside of it being in our country, anyway. That was, however, until recently, as we now have a lead.”

His attention turned fully back to her, and he pushed himself free from the wall, clasping his hands behind his back. “Addy, I would like to ask of you a favour.”

From beyond the walls of the hallway, there was the sound of a flushing toilet and some groaning.

“I’m... just going to handle her, J’onn,” Alex added, stepping away from the two of them.

“We’ll reconnect back in the meeting room,” J’onn agreed, looking away only briefly before turning back to her. “So?”

Well. Favours were things she could do. She was good at those. “Okay.”

* * *

The room J’onn brought her to inspired an odd mixture of familiarity and discomfort. It was, she was fairly certain, the exact same room they had her in, when they’d originally dragged her out of Maxwell Lord’s testing labs and back to the D.E.O. to be checked over. It had the same octagonal glass prison, the same lights - though without the sickly green tinge - and the same terminal in front of it, meant to control the opening and closing of the prison itself.

They even had the same chair, and she could tell, because someone had clearly spent about five minutes hammering the massive bend she had left in it when she’d first accessed her body’s new capabilities, leaving it lumpy and crude.

The only thing of difference was what it contained. In it was a humanoid figure, though their body was naturally a bit hunched. They had blue skin that reminded her of a frog’s, and they were about eight feet tall, all told. They had hair, though it was a bright neon-yellow colour, and had been shaved down nearly to their skull, out from which several long antennae of some kind poked out, twitching every few seconds.

They were, also, for whatever reason, wearing overalls. Only overalls, not a shirt or - by her guess - underwear to be seen. They weren’t even wearing shoes.

“The Vigvar are a favourite of smugglers,” J’onn began, motioning towards the alien inside. “Naturally resistant to most forms of telepathy in the universe, capable of hibernating without sustenance and very low oxygen levels, and capable of regenerating so long as they have at least their torso and head remaining. They cannot bleed out conventionally, for their blood is as thick as mud and clots instantly before growing flesh out from it like branches.”

The Vigvar - apparently - inside wasn’t even paying any of them attention. Instead, they were looking up at the ceiling, laying out across the ground on their back, their legs pulled up and splayed over the seat of the chair, one foot folded over the other. A closer look, now that she had the chance, revealed each of their eyes were like iridescent oil spills; completely black until the light caught it in just the right way to make rainbow patterns spill across its surface.

“Now, this Vigvar we caught working for one of the major retailers of alien weaponry. We don’t know who it is, but we found her”—and, huh, that was a bit of a surprise; it wasn’t like aliens were expected to have human sex characteristics, but despite the tall stature they were next to impossible to gender from what she knew of alien anatomy—“with enough weapons and ammunition to have made a fair recreation of the gunpowder plot. She has refused to say who her boss is, and unfortunately, I was unable to access her mind to get answers one way or another.”

J’onn looked towards her, and Addy now suddenly had a fairly good idea about what she was about to spend her time on.

“You, however, whether through sheer force or raw determination, continue to break conventional logic when it comes to telepathic abilities, and I request that you make a concerted effort to find some answers.” J’onn turned away, wandering up to the terminal to tap across the screen. The glass walls shuddered, and the one at the front, just next to the stairs leading up to the glass prison, began to open. “If not, that is fine, but—”

“I can do it.” She certainly wasn’t about to let someone imply she couldn’t, either.

The Vigvar looked away from the ceiling, finally, towards the opening in her cage. Despite the lack of eyebrows, she still nudged up her brow ridge in a look of utter dismissal. A melodic-sounding language spilled from her lips in short bursts, her head turning towards J’onn.

Whatever she said, J’onn evidently got, as his face twisted up in disgust.

“Would you translate that for me?” Addy asked, mostly out of curiosity, as she cleared the few stairs leading up to the cage. Across from her, at the other end of it, the alien rose up into a sit, crossed her arms, and gave a defiant upwards tilt of her chin.

“I would really rather not,” J’onn rejected, face still twisted into a grimace. “She can speak English. She just isn’t doing it, I believe, because she finds it funny to know I’m the only one who can understand what she’s saying.”

He was apparently on the mark with that assessment, as the alien began to laugh. It wasn’t the laugh of a human, no, evidently whatever modifications to the throat needed to make those sounds turned it into a bit of a lizard-like giggle, loud squeaky notes repeated with some frequency.

Well, she’d just find out on her own, anyway.

She unspooled her power, accessing her coreself and spreading it out again as she stepped deeper into the cage, her range catching on the alien across from her. She felt it brush over the woman, and for a moment was briefly a little shocked. Not a lot, but a little. A lot of those who J’onn might label as resistant to telepathy or other psychic abilities tended to feel like great, gaping voids; absences in the nearby fabric and frequency of minds in the world around them.

There was none of that here.

No, instead the barrier to entry was how unintelligible it was. She accessed the brain of the alien across from her about as easy, almost _easier_ , than she might any human. But rather than the understandable feed of information she would get on anyone else she could breach through as she automatically adjusted to receiving and translating that information into understandable cues for her senses, this was just noise. Like television static.

She really, _really_ disliked television static. It was why she hated sparkling water so much—you were, in effect, drinking static. Why would you do that?

She certainly wouldn’t, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that she was the biggest voice of reason in her in-group.

Nonetheless, a quick look over the information she _was_ receiving painted a bit of a better picture. Static it might be, but it was static with a _pattern_. Natural mental encryption was absolutely not a thing she had seen before, as, in any other world without spontaneously-generated, non-evolutionary psychic abilities, you generally don’t ever need to adapt yourself in that direction. It was, to be blunt, stupid; universal protection may be nice, but evolution didn’t look at the big picture. If you needed to evolve to hide from telepathic predators, you would evolve to be invisible to _that_ type of telepathy.

This was more universal. Like someone had fed the brain into a computer and had it spit back out lengths of deeply encrypted information on it.

Unfortunately for the Vigvar, Addy was rather quite _good_ at computational abilities. Encryption was a bit of a joke when you worked on her level.

Still, it meant accessing her core again, rerouting the information back to it, starting up the larger matrix which helped her compute vast amounts of information at once - a thing she would normally only really use for inter-shard communication efforts, and therefore didn’t use very often, considering the absence thereof - and fed the encryption into it, cycling through another few years of power to break it over a metaphorical knee.

A few seconds later and she had her key, applied it to a greater part of her hub - the one meant to automate most of the input from beings she was connected to - rerouted the focus, and...

The Vigvar blinked, cringed, and then crumpled as she brute-forced her way through the last remaining barrier, overcome by what was undoubtedly a very painful headache.

She didn’t care, and instead merely dipped inside.

Images flashed across her mind, rapidly surfacing as the alien thought about all the things they shouldn’t be thinking about if they wanted them to avoid the attention of a telepath. Never learning how to redirect thought patterns because you’re naturally immune to telepathy? Understandable, but short-sighted. There was always a bigger fish.

She shut her eyes, started dredging the information. Addresses, locations, merchandise, and, finally, a face and a name.

Someone—someone... or, well. Not a _name_ , just a moniker, she guessed. Nobody named their offspring Roulette, or if they did, Addy had some sincere concerns about their gambling addiction. Nonetheless, the face was easy to archive, and so were the past dozen or so venues they worked from.

That, it would seem, was the major theme here. A moving, nomadic gun show of a kind, filled to the brim with anyone wealthy or connected enough to get an invite. It would seem Roulette mainly targeted two groups: the absurdly wealthy, and the highly _successful_. The two, unsurprisingly, weren’t necessarily connected. She especially liked sending out invites to successful criminal organizations and teams. It was, in the Vigvar’s opinion - or Uta, which was her name - the way she found her bodyguards, a group called The Demolition Team.

Unfortunately, she also didn’t know where the next one was going to be. Nor any of the greater specifics. Uta had been hired, primarily, as muscle and to run guns, in large part because someone had apparently started letting it leak that the authorities had telepaths in their employ. Not incorrect, but then J’onn was rarely candid about his abilities and Addy herself had limited interaction with the agency as a whole.

They’d have to look into it. They might have another mole, wonderful.

She also reached a bit deeper, down past the surface level things that Uta was fairly certain she was about to get killed for, and started the rapid-fire process of copying over all of the relevant language knowledge the alien had taken in. There was a surprising amount of it, consisting of about a half-dozen alien languages and about three or four Earth-specific ones that Addy didn’t need, but helped spruce up her lingo and give contextual clues for certain words in those languages.

Extracting herself from Uta’s brain, now much more linguistically-inclined and rather more informed of the situation, Addy found herself staring at a face-down, groaning Vigvar. A quick pulse of her power, just to check, and...

Yes, that made sense. The psychic resistance had made them rather unfortunately vulnerable to the damage passive telepathic rummaging can do. Well, they’d recover in a day or so.

Stepping back out, she heard more than saw the glass prison close back up behind her. She turned towards J’onn, who was looking placidly at Uta, like she might at any moment give the bit up and emerge on her feet and laughing. Which she had done repeatedly in the couple of days since they’d acquired her, actually.

“So?” J’onn probed.

“It would appear we are dealing with a nomadic arms dealer by the name of Roulette,” Addy began, clearing the last few steps and coming up next to J’onn, watching as he finished putting the locks back into place on the prison. “She hires aliens or humans, and deals mostly to, specifically, the wealthy or capable. She has a fondness for criminal organizations, but appears to largely cater to the obscenely wealthy who may want some exoticism in their next poaching visit, among other things. I also now have a mental map of her last locations, if you could provide something for me to note all of this down. Uta - the alien - unfortunately, has no idea where the next show will be, as she was more of a grunt than a coworker.”

J’onn logged out of the terminal and nodded, gesturing for her to follow. “We’ll go to the meeting room, and I’ll get the map set up for you to put pins into.”

As they did, Addy opened her mouth and started filling him in on the other details. The ones that, at least, didn't require a map.

* * *

National City on a map always gave away how absurdly planned the city was. It had taken clues from New York’s layout, by Addy’s estimate, opting for a heavy grid-based layout that spanned the nooks and crannies of livable space between vast stretches of dried-out Californian desert.

She’d managed to put about sixteen pins into it, and what she got out of it was something without a pattern. A lot of the gun shows tended to happen in the less wealthy parts of the city, in the parts where warehouses and factories had long since gone abandoned, but they were spread out throughout the entire city, and only accounted for about half of the pins. The other half had no real discernable explanation—the past three shows had, for example, been located at a park, an old arcade that had gone out of business, and a warehouse respectively.

“Prolific,” J’onn noted, standing a few paces away as he poured over the holographic map, his face twisting into a frown. “Prolific and very capable at accessing unused properties. Wonderful, we have a career criminal who knows how to keep out of the law’s hands, and they’re selling weapons.”

“She must be fairly wealthy, too,” Addy pointed out, gesturing towards the scattering of pins in the higher-end parts of the city. One gun show had been at a manor of a sort, owned by someone, certainly, but a building that seemed to have seen no real foot traffic outside of the gun show itself. “Or well-connected.”

“A worst-case scenario,” J’onn grunted.

Steps echoed into the open air of the meeting area, drawing Addy’s gaze away from the map and towards the hallway. Two figures, one significantly more haggard than the other, walked side-by-side towards them. Kara looked miserable, her hair drawn back into a messy ponytail, her skin pale. Alex, meanwhile, looked miserable in her own way, with a viscerally grossed-out expression on her face that would no doubt take several days to fully subside.

“I see you’re back on your feet, Supergirl,” J’onn said, a note of humour in his voice.

Kara glowered at him, very briefly, before her face fell back into looking mostly just queasy. She found a seat next to the map table and slumped down into it, pressing her hands into her face. “Never again,” she croaked out. “Never ever.”

“You do know you only feel this bad because of the remedy, right?” Alex asked, taking the seat next to Kara’s, rubbing a bit tiredly at her eyes. “It was only necessary because you kept floating and putting holes in things.”

“I _knoow_ ,” Kara whined, scrubbing at her face with her palms. “I know. I just don’t think alcohol is for me. Not if it affects me, anyway.”

“Regardless, what have you two found out?” Alex redirected, clearly done with that line of conversation.

“Our weapon dealer is prolific, slippery, and sells to rich or successful clientele,” J’onn began, gesturing towards the table. Kara looked up from her hands, trying to focus a bit on the map in front of her. “What’s left over, it would seem, finds its way into the hands of smaller, less successful gangs or, in the case of what you observed tonight, dealers who then sell to anyone who can pay enough for them at a discount. It’s unclear if Roulette herself is supplying those weapons to said dealers, or if it’s the criminal organizations she sells to outside of her more socialite buyers, but if I had to make a guess, I would say it was both. She probably has a deal going to further proliferate her goods, as it would force others to buy them as well to match up with their enemies.”

“That doesn’t really help us get access to her,” Alex pointed out, frowning. “How would you even get an invite in the first place?”

“She hands them out to anyone she thinks would fit the criteria. Rich, morally nebulous, unlikely to have friends in the police force,” Addy supplied. “People who go to the venues wear masks to conceal their identities, so I couldn’t identify anyone through the Vigvar’s memories, however the Vigvar herself had given invites out to people as part of her job.”

“...I’d’ve asked Lena, if not for the situation,” Kara said, at last, balancing her chin against a closed fist. “But considering the tension going on, it’s... it’s not a good look. I’m not sure if we’re fighting, technically, but that’d set the wrong tone for our friendship, if it does recover. I don’t want her to expect to, well, have to give me _favours_ or something to get back into my good graces.”

“Actually,” J’onn interrupted. “What is going on between the three of you?”

Kara groaned, refusing to answer.

“Lena Luthor created a device that could detect aliens. Or, rather, it may be better to say it was a device that detected humans, and when it didn’t, would indicate as much. Touch-based, portable, she didn’t realize the ramifications of that possibly entering the market,” Addy offered, looking back down at the table, at the pins on the map. “I told her what it could be weaponized for, and she seemed deeply uncomfortable by the idea, and told me we would talk later. I am returning to work in two days, and haven’t spoken to her since, so it’s still left in the air as to whether or not she has taken my advice for it.”

J’onn sighed, rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “Then all we can do right now is try to find a lead, or a potential avenue to approach this with.”

“...About that, actually,” Alex interrupted, a thoughtful look on her face. “I might know somebody who could help, and who I know would probably be interested in this.”

J’onn turned to look at her, curious.

“Maggie Sawyer,” Alex explained. “She doesn’t owe me a favour, but I feel like this is where her department’s focus is, and she’s much more active with the alien community. She might know something.”

J’onn hesitated, just for a moment, before slowly nodding. “You three can do that, in that case. I will be handling agent deployment to these past locations to see if we can identify anything. Though, speaking of you three, it is currently one in the morning and I want all of you to go home and get some sleep. You can approach the detective tomorrow, without being sleep deprived.”

Alex opened her mouth, a stubborn look on her face, before slowly shutting it. She nodded, curt. Turning towards Kara, she nudged her with her foot, causing Kara to jolt up a bit, mumbling hoarsely about being awake. “Can I crash at your place?”

“If Addy’s ‘kay with it,” Kara offered, rubbing at her eyes.

Alex looked at her.

She shrugged. “I don’t have a problem so long as you do not intend to share my bed. There is only room enough for me and Saturday.”

For whatever reason, Alex just rolled her eyes.

* * *

Despite apparently taking up a sizable cut of the city’s budget, the National City Police Department was a messy, messy place. With off-white, pockmarked walls, pale nicotine-stained tiles, old brownish tables, and an endless tide of people moving in and out, it was bad in its own unique way, different from the D.E.O., by being more disorienting, in terms of senses, than it was bland.

Alex, to her right, was glancing around with an awkward, stifled sort of look, while Kara, to her left, was busy working through her third cup of coffee, a set of sunglasses over her eyes. They’d left about an hour ago to arrive at the precinct, and it had taken an hour in large part because they’d gotten stuck in early-morning traffic, as well as the several pit stops for yet more coffee and breakfast foods.

The secretary in front of them was a woman in her late forties that looked not a day over eighty. Her hair had gone salt-and-pepper, heavy lines defined the spaces beneath each eye, she smelled profusely of cigarette smoke, and her skin was so pale it bordered on translucent. She was typing, as she had been doing for the last five minutes since they had come up and had been told, in no uncertain terms, to wait.

Kara continued to drain her coffee even as the steam wafting from it fogged up her glasses.

Finally, the woman retracted her hands, breathed out in a long, put-upon sigh, as though they were the worst thing to be inflicted on her in the last several hours, and turned her full, unbridled, and entirely unwanted attention on them. “Welcome to the National City Police Department,” she began, her voice flat and devoid of warmth. “Are you here to report a crime?”

“No,” Alex replied, voice wavering with a bit of restrained annoyance. “We’re here looking for a Detective Sawyer?”

The woman stared at them for at least another five, maybe ten seconds, like they might take what they said back. She grimaced, looked back down, and typed something out on her mechanical keyboard. After squinting at the screen for a few moments, she swivelled around in her chair and gestured, deep into the throng of moving bodies and officers, towards one of the branching hallways. “Third door on your left.”

Then she was gone, her attention elsewhere as she went back to whatever she was doing on her computer.

Alex, rolling her eyes, grabbed Kara by one wrist and Addy by the either, apparently trusting neither of their navigational abilities - and, surely, it was only _one_ time, she could be trusted not to fly around in view of people who may take exception to that - and dragging them into the throng of sweaty bodies, old spice, and cops.

Bodies squished, bumped, and otherwise impeded their path, but didn’t stop them from emerging out from the other side of the crowd, stepping past one guy who had decided to sit down on the ground, ignoring the pleas from the cops, and into the hallway. Alex let go of both of their wrists, Kara bringing her hand back up to her cup to hold it steady as she drained what was left of it directly into her mouth.

Addy, meanwhile, spent most of her time wondering why exactly Kara was drinking so much coffee this time around. She was fairly certain she shouldn’t have a hangover - which, actually, raised the question about whether or not Kryptonians should be able to get them - but sensitivity to light, addictive cravings for coffee, and a grouchy personality sure fit the definition of one.

Then again, J’onn _had_ said it ‘was a punishment’, so maybe it was intentionally provoking the sensation of a hangover. That sounded just the right amount of pointless cruelty to act as a teaching aid, in much the same way that forcing a teenager to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes was.

Arriving past several bulletin boards, more inconspicuous wall and floor stains, and finally, at the third door on the left, Alex knocked once, then twice.

“One second!” Maggie’s voice called out from inside, followed by some shuffling and mumbling, then a loud _beep_ as, presumably, she ended her phone call.

Footsteps approached, and the door yanked itself open. Maggie stared between the three of them - first at Addy herself, then Alex, then Kara - before, mutedly, waving them in.

They stepped through in a jumbled unison, squeezing through the narrow doorway and emerging out the other side of it. Maggie, quietly, shut it behind them.

Maggie’s office bore much of a resemblance to the rest of the station. Stained walls, an unnecessary amount of bulletin boards, unclean-looking floor tiles. What it had over everything else was _colour_ , in the form of plants, most of which Addy was fairly certain weren’t native to Earth, let alone America. She had a single desk tucked away on one side, with a pile of paper just next to the monitor, and a wheeled chair of similar make to the one the secretary had been in.

Wandering over to it, Maggie grabbed said chair, wheeled it out from behind the desk, spun it around, and dropped into it, facing all of them with her hands folded in her lap. “And what, exactly, have I done to earn the pleasure of a visit?”

Alex reached down into her pants pocket, quickly fishing her wallet out of it and letting it flop open to reveal her badge. She held it up, seemingly for emphasis. “We’re here on official business, actually. We’re looking into those guns from last night, and who might be selling them.”

Maggie met Alex’s gaze blandly, eyes slipping away to jump between herself and Kara. “And these two?”

“Kara is here to help as an investigative reporter,” Alex said, more or less reciting the lines J’onn had fed them over the phone for this exact sort of situation. After all, you didn’t normally involve civilians in matters of federal safety. “And Addy is here as technical support and aid due to her expertise in the field.”

Maggie leaned back, making a short note of noise with her mouth; a hum of a kind. She pointed towards Kara. “A cub reporter for a vanity magazine”—her arm rotated, now pointing towards Addy herself—“and an unknown researcher who has roughly a month of work behind them, with no real prior history.”

Addy took great exception to that statement, but unfortunately wasn’t in a place to remind Maggie how many to-the-powers-of she was older than her, and had seen both the rise and fall of great empires, both of which she was, generally, partially or fully responsible for.

Alex, meanwhile, just froze. Her eyes narrowed, a sort of dangerous, unflinching look slipping across her. It reminded Addy, faintly, of iron: cold, unbendable, but unfortunately brittle if not treated well.

Maggie to her credit was quick to backtrack, raising both her hands up in a conventional display of surrender. “Look,” she started, voice a dry, somewhat humorous drawl. “I’m not going to ask if your adopted sister or her roommate are agents or not. I already know they’re aliens, that door has been open for a _while_. Addy I always sort of knew of, telepathics flock together like birds of a feather and all that, that and the—you know, flying she did last night. Kara? Less so, but still, not unexpected. I also don’t frankly care if they are, because one way or another what you said was still likely true. Investigative skill and technical expertise, both enough to work on leads, right?”

Alex hesitated for a moment, a long few moments really, before nodding. She tucked her wallet back away, scowling - if without much heat - in Maggie’s direction. “You have to stop doing that. If you keep it up, I’ll have you bag you and drag you back to headquarters to get you to sign your weight in paperwork.”

Fearless in a way only one can be when they think they’ve won an argument, Maggie merely shrugged. “Anyway, you were here about the guns, and who’s selling them, right?”

Alex relaxed her posture a bit more at that, nodding. “Yeah, a woman by the name of Roulette, who has apparently been a pretty big provider.”

“Not to belabour a point or anything, but god are you guys slow on the uptake,” Maggie said, again in a startling display of hubris and recklessness. Addy just about watched Alex’s entire spine straighten, her fists begin to close, as one does not merely insult Alex’s labours without sufficient pushback. Maggie was, of course, none the wiser to any of this, as she had already climbed back out of her seat - now, evidently, proving only a purpose as a theatrical throne from which to gesticulate from, by Addy’s estimate - had wandered over to her desk, and was now busy rifling through one of the drawers. “We’ve had an eye on Roulette for the last... year or two? I think?”

Finding whatever she was looking for, Maggie retrieved a brown folder about as thick as a good paperback novel and smacked it down onto the desk, glancing back their way just in time to finally catch Alex’s rather flinty look. If anything, that seemed to have spurred her on more, as a smile spread across her face.

No, Addy did almost certainly _not_ understand the dynamics going on here.

“Hell, I’m not even really the first detective on this case. I picked it up from the last guy, because he quit after she got out of jail. Roulette has been a general pain in the ass of everyone and everybody by being atrociously wealthy and prefers to make her money by catering to the upper class.” Maggie flipped the folder open, paging through about two-thirds of it. “It’s only been in the last year or so that she’s gotten involved with aliens, and, well.” She motioned towards them, stepping back.

Addy stepped forward alongside Alex and Kara, and finally saw what Maggie had paged to. It was an article from about six months ago, a picture of an empty lot with ‘ZOO STOLEN FROM THE LOT, ANIMALS, PEOPLE AND ALL’ written in bold text above it.

...She faintly remembered this, actually. Hadn’t Alex mentioned it once? Or was it Susan?

“We were on this case,” Alex said, dubiously, staring down at it. She looked up at Maggie, her brows furrowing. “There was no indication that humans were involved in the heists.”

“Yes, well, she was, because...” Maggie reached over, turning the page. In it were a few photos of a warehouse, with a fair number of boxes and cages. All of them were empty, but some still had straw sticking out from between the bars. Not only that, but there was a rather large surplus of errant signs sitting around. Ones advertising various animal attractions. “We found this, one of hers actually. We think they ditched the stuff with her after the people she was selling to figured out they couldn’t read English. Didn’t want it to be too exotic.”

“This is...” Alex trailed off, reaching up to drag a hand through her hair. “You’re telling me we just _didn’t_ know about this?”

“Neither did we,” Maggie said, gently. “This is fairly recent, and I only figured it out because of some aid from aliens in the area. One of them was trying to use the place as a shelter, found the signage, and put two-and-two together.”

“So someone completely willing to sell her own species into slavery for the whims of wealthy intergalactic entities has moved from the slave trade to weapons manufacturing and selling,” Kara said, adding input to the conversation for what was literally the first time since they’d gotten in the car about an hour ago.

Maggie nodded, reaching out to tuck her fingers beneath the bulk, flipping the remainder of it over so that only a few pages were left. “On the bright side, however, that sort of personality does not, even remotely, engender loyalty among those who follow her. She has some bodyguards who are kept loyal because of the cash she gives them, you’ve probably never heard of them, but Rosie’s Crew, or The Demolition Team, became involved with her fairly recently. Before then they mostly dealt in insurance fraud, they’d set your property to fail violently and you’d get the cushy windfall out of it. They drew too much attention after one of their schemes left about twenty dead in Colorado, jumped state lines, and fell in with her when she offered them alien tech.

“But for the most part? Outside of those who have been cowed by fear, of which there are plenty, her crime ring has quite a few holes in it. I’ve even got a contact in it, and about the next venue, but before I even touch on it, I want to get some concessions out of you before we commit to anything.”

Alex stared, utterly vacant, at Maggie.

“I know that’s not the hottest look to be having in the middle of a crime scene, but you have to understand. This? This isn’t my department’s first rodeo with Roulette. She’s crazy, driven only by money, and has maimed at least four cops. One of them was my partner.” Maggie’s face hardened very minutely, before smoothing back out into something casual. “Lost his arm because we, thoughtlessly, attempted to take down one of her venues and she responded to that by siccing her team and about twenty gangbangers with high-yield laser weaponry on us.”

Alex’s face, in turn, softened at that. “Well,” she began, sounding much more diplomatic than she normally was for anyone, even J’onn. “What do you have in mind?”

Maggie’s face split into a bit of a smile, a roguish grin of sorts. “We’re not assaulting her gun show, not the one we have upcoming. But we can infiltrate it, get some faces, identities. As far as we can tell, she doesn’t rotate out her guards or security force for each one, so we can identify what exactly we’re up against. On top of that, it gives us a bit of a look into what she might have for defence, as anything she’s selling, she has in surplus as well, and apparently, she’s got some new firepower.”

“I’d have to talk to my boss,” Alex said, considering. “And the taskforce we’d send in, it’d probably have to be small. Selective. But we might be able to work something out.”

“Oh, yeah, selective for certain,” Maggie said. “All of her venues have a dress code, masquerade style theatrical bullshit. You’d need to dress fancy, and whoever you bring with you? Just as fancy. No more than, eh, four or five to this group. It’d give us away if she suddenly had a surplus of unfamiliar people coming together. She might ask questions, rather than assume we’re rotating in and out.”

Alex was nodding along, fishing her phone out of her pocket. She glanced up, first towards Maggie, then towards Kara - still wearing her sunglasses and stubbornly looking in the opposite direction of the overhead light - and then towards Addy. After a moment, she nodded. “Mind if I step out for a moment?”

“Nope, go ahead.” Maggie gestured, openly, with one hand.

Smiling appreciatively, Alex brought her cellphone up to her ear while, with her other hand, she opened the door and stepped through it, shutting it behind her just as she was beginning to talk with whoever - likely J’onn - that was on the other end.

Maggie’s attention turned to the two of them, next. Briefly, she looked at Kara, then to Addy.

“So. What did you say your species was, again?”

“I didn’t.”

Maggie smiled, charming in all the ways that might've been somewhat influential, had she cared even remotely for that sort of thing. “It always helps to know. Who knows, I might run into some of your kind, and if you told me I could figure out how to behave around them.”

Well, that was a fairly easy thing to shut down. Looking Maggie dead in the eyes, despite the relative discomfort of it, and keeping her voice level, Addy did her best to project complete sincerity. “If you met one of my kind, it would already be much, much too late.”

Maggie's smile strained, turned outright brittle and uncomfortable, but it served the purpose of making her stop talking, so Addy would consider it a win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is early because I have yet another thing I have to do on my writing day tomorrow, so I cranked this one out today, just to clear up my schedule. This is, all things considered, a bit of a set-up chapter for the followup Maggie interlude that will follow, but I think I hit a certain rhythm with it which works.
> 
> Thank you for reading, as always.


	42. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 15 - INTERLUDE 2 [MAGGIE]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maggie's fairly certain she's gotten in a bit too deep for her own good.

“Welcome to the D.E.O., Detective Sawyer.”

The room that spread out in front of her was certainly one of the more state-of-the-art places she’d been in. Feds, it would appear, got all the nice new toys, especially when they were of the secretive black-ops variety. The area was a long, rectangular room, with a catwalk above it, absolutely teeming with agents. The room down below it was sleek, with the stylings of futurism tucked away into its metal walls, fogged-glass barriers, and recessed lights. At the far end of it, up on a raised platform, dozens of monitors just behind him, a black man with a pinched expression was speaking calmly with a small gaggle of agents, watching with calm eyes as, below him, another group ferried crates of illegal arms around silently, passing confiscated guns and other weapons between one another as they went.

It had taken surprisingly little time to get signed off and taken into the headquarters. Maggie thought it might’ve been just a little _too_ easy, almost; a ten-ish minute phone call from Alex and she was now apparently allowed to see the secrets the government didn’t even want the cops to know. Sure, they might’ve driven her over in a van with tinted windows - and by her estimate, taken a purposefully overcomplicated route to make it nearly impossible to mentally follow where the van was leading - but it still all felt just a _little_ too quick, all things considered.

Not, of course, that she was about to mention that. No, this was the furthest she’d ever gotten when it came to actually _hopefully_ getting the feds to work with her precinct, and at this point she was honestly going to take what she could get. Part of the reason why the science division had been set up in the first place was that the government was notoriously reluctant to give quite literally even _minimal_ context or information on what they might be facing. In fact, you were more likely not to get anything in the first place, and have to sort of just go with your instinct, which, honestly, usually didn’t work out too well.

Especially not in a place like _Gotham_.

Not that she was in Gotham anymore, though. National City had been in several ways a place to find herself again, to leave behind the supernatural antics of a city so thoroughly polluted by cults and insane clown worship that it was an honest to god wonder half the planet didn’t know about it yet. She did, admittedly due to accident more than anything else, and it had served her mental stability well enough to already have a finger on the pulse of weird shit in the first place. Honestly, meeting an alien the first time around would’ve probably gone significantly worse, had she not seen a literal demon try to eat a cop car before.

Considering her luck though, it wasn’t really a surprise she’d ended up in the alien refugee capital of America. Fitting in among that had been both too easy and hard, there were bits of solidarity shared among the people she knew. Those who had been rejected, turned away for their otherness, but generally, the contexts were skewed, and cultures always clashed. She fit, and yet she didn’t.

Though she fit in among aliens _much_ better than she did her coworkers, or humans in general, so a little chafing wasn’t exactly the detriment it might make itself out to be.

It was why coming here was in many ways utterly _surreal_. The D.E.O. was marginally known about by the alien community, even before some of it had started to reach the public. They were, second maybe only to Cadmus - another one of those groups people just _knew_ about because of their habit of negatively impacting alien communities - the bogeyman of the alien community. In a lot of ways that opinion had softened, but most aliens still remembered the abductions, and the fact that the D.E.O. worked extensively - and sometimes almost exclusively - with Cadmus, and that not a person who had ended up in the system had ever really been seen again.

She sure as shit didn’t trust them. No, despite Alex’s good heart and the fact that they were seemingly employing at least two aliens, the D.E.O. was still a source of dread for most people. If they weren’t arresting you, they were attacking you, or so it always seemed. They had a lot to own up for, and at this point, she was fairly certain they probably wouldn’t ever arrive at that. An actual apology for stealing away people in the night felt, fundamentally, impossible; things just didn’t work that way, not this deep into federal agencies, when an admission of guilt was itself a condemnation of the government as a whole.

But at this point, they were honestly her best bet to take Roulette down, so she was going to just have to work with what she had.

Alex passed into her view, glancing her way and offering a slight smile. It was a stiff one, for sure, and it fit. Alex was, in Maggie’s opinion, a thoroughbred fed. From marrow to the flesh, she was just _that_ sort of person, the one who seemed to thrive under the fact that they had enough rules to bury themselves in. A hardass, in other words.

Which, you know, was _kinda_ hot? Not going to lie, but Maggie was fairly convinced if she _was_ gay - and it seemed like she might be, her radar and ability to read people might not be perfect, but they were at least _good_ \- she was as repressed as a woman could be without going full circle and joining the catholic church.

With a healthier mindset? She might’ve considered it, but it always felt... _slimy_ sexualizing someone who wasn’t really there yet, wasn’t comfortable enough in their own skin to reflect it back at her. Not that Alex wasn’t a fully grown-ass adult, and a woman being straight hadn’t stopped her from finding them hot. It was just... emotional vulnerability? Uncertainty?

Not really her thing. Which sounded really callous when she thought about it.

Still, she returned the smile because it was the best she could do for a lesbian who hadn’t even considered that there might be more to the world than the dimensions of the closet she’d been shoved into. Solidarity and all that, and, well, hopefully she’d come to terms with it if she was gay.

Stepping forward to leave the elevator, Maggie turned and watched Addy walk on past her, long strides of her leg leading her away from the rest of the crowd. Addy was an interesting person, more interesting than Alex or Kara, really, but not in a way Maggie was entirely sure she wanted to engage with. She was, at minimal, _mildly_ terrifying, and had a good sense for her own boundaries - which, kudos, a lot of people would grit their teeth and let their personal limits get trampled over out of politeness; Addy had no such interest in doing the same - and she was a deeply interesting alien, all things aside.

Addy had actually come to her attention a fairly long while ago, well before Fort Rozz ever crashed. She’d gotten information about it from both a girl she’d been dating at the time - a Lika, nice girl, was only here as a pit-stop on her pilgrimage - and a friend that someone, one day, had just started existing in the city with psychic abilities so powerful people had been genuinely terrified.

She still didn’t get the exact scope of it—as once people had noticed Addy had little interest in subsuming everyone’s minds or whatever, they had become very quiet and protective of the specifics of her power, but suffice to say the words thrown around were generally ‘impossibly powerful’ and ‘like a world with a mind’. What Addy could do, well, she didn’t know, but a benchmark for the intensity of it had always been in terms of being unable to comprehend how something could have that much psychic presence.

It made the words ‘if you met one of my kind, it would already be too late’ carry a bit more meaning, though. Addy was, all things aside, and she didn’t like to use the word, but it fit, almost _domesticated_. She had adapted, seemingly, to live among people without any psychic abilities and seemed to be handling it well enough. She had the power to pop people’s heads from a distance, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine others of her kind might not be like that.

Dragging her eyes away from Addy, she let them settle on the other alien in the room. Kara was an interesting conundrum, all things considered. She seemed to be the emotional heart between the three girls - Alex being at the far end of overemotional at times, and Addy the opposite - and acted as a link of sorts. She showed Addy a kindness that was hard to find, in a way that Maggie wished she’d been given as a kid, but one she liked to see, anyway. Sisterhood without blood was a powerful thing, after all.

She was, by far, the social pillar of the group, and the most conventionally human acting. Not to say that she _was_ , you don’t drink off-world cider if you’ve got human anatomy, not without dying or having it eat through your intestinal tract like acid - with the end result generally being death - though she kept her cards fairly close to her chest as to what she was, and where she came from. She certainly wasn’t telepathic, and Maggie was pretty sure she had some degree of enhanced physical abilities - as evidenced by how much of a struggle it had been for Alex to get her to the car when drunk - but that was about it.

Telepathic resistance and physical power were a dime-a-dozen among the species of the universe, and many of them wouldn’t look any different than Kara. It was a pointless endeavour to make some guesses, though for whatever reason a part of her felt deeply, deeply familiar, and the feeling hadn’t ever gone away.

The agents, working like bees, turned to stare at the four of them as the elevators slipped shut behind her, hundreds of eyes scanning over each of them. Some agents, she noticed, didn’t recognize them, confused, but the majority _did_. At least they did for Addy, it would seem, as about a half-dozen people waved from her at a distance, and got a corresponding nod in return.

As people returned to what they were doing, only three people broke away. One was the black man, who had stepped down from the stage, folded his hands behind his back, and was making strides towards them. Agents split away to the side as he went, opening a gap in the sea of moving bodies. It wasn’t exactly hard to tell, just from the way everyone from the women to the most stubborn looking men ceded ground to him, that he was either high up on the totem pole or scary, possibly both. He was smiling at Addy, face crinkling, but as his eyes shifted to her, meeting hers from across the room, his face became distant. Cool, strategic, and clinical.

So, probably their boss. Probably.

The other two were a bit more out of place. One was a rather traditional butch woman, of all things. Short black hair, a bit of a blunt face, and a body built with muscle and stockiness in mind. She pulled away from a smaller contingent of agents and was making confident strides towards them, or perhaps more accurately Addy.

The last of them was, well, what she could only describe as a nerd. He looked a bit out of place, an awkward, almost goofy smile on his face and the way his uniform didn’t quite fit him the way it did everyone else, his body just a bit too gangly, not built like the rest. He had a good jawline to his face, one that might’ve actually looked mildly intimidating if he wasn’t juggling three separate pieces of technology and stumbling over his own feet as he approached.

Alex, apparently seeing what she was, said something to Kara in a quiet voice before wandering over towards the guy, meeting him part-way and taking two of the devices out of his arms, rolling her eyes at something he said, the noise of it drowned out by the murmur of the crowd.

The other two arrived not long after one another, the larger man stepping away to speak with Alex as she turned back around to approach, and the butch woman going right up to Addy.

This conversation, at least, she was close enough to hear.

“Haven’t seen you in a while, Addy,” the woman said, a smile working its way onto her face.

Addy stared at her, nodded after a moment. “Sorry Susan, it would appear holding down a job is difficult. I hope you recovered well?”

Susan reached up a bit to touch at her shoulder, where Maggie could just make out the faintest bit of bandage peeking out from beneath. “Nothing too bad,” she said. “Stitches popped last night after I got into some strenuous activity.”

Addy blinked, long and slow. Catlike, or maybe like an owl? Her eyes weren’t all that big on her face, but they gave the impression she was a bit gawky and frog-eyed nonetheless. “I thought they did not have you doing missions while wounded,” she said, confusion in her voice, yet somehow managing not to make it into a question.

“...Not that kind of strenuous activity, bud,” Susan said, dryly. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” Addy said, ceding ground as her gaze drifted off to the side, her attention briefly lost. “Try not to do that.”

Susan snorted, turning back around as Alex and the other two finally arrived.

“Hi Addy, Kara,” the nerdy one said, his eyes skating between the two of them, then to her, where he startled like he hadn’t even realized she was there. “...New person. Is she a new recruit? Or... well, whatever you call them?”

“No, Agent Schott,” the larger guy said, his voice a low rumble. “This is Detective Sawyer, she’s here to help us with the illegal alien weapons which are being traded.”

Agent Schott, apparently, made a face, screwed up in something like guilt as he glanced towards Susan and, in particular, where the wound was.

“Still not your fault, Winn,” Susan said, exasperation in her voice. “You didn’t make it explode.”

“I was studying it, though,” Winn returned, pulling his arms up in a shrug.

“It was legitimately rigged to explode, we were both in the other room, and nobody knew it had—”

“Agent Vasquez, our visitor does not need to be in the know,” the man cut in, smoothly, his eyes drifting towards her. He regarded her, just as cold and distant as before, but whatever he saw up close, he apparently found satisfying enough to drop the coldness from his gaze, leaving it mostly clinical and detached. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Right,” Alex butt in, motioning towards the large man in question. “This is Director J’onn J’onzz, my boss. J’onn, this is Maggie Sawyer, a detective for the Science Police, a division of the National City Police Force.”

An alien running the D.E.O.? Well, that would certainly explain the shift in focus. She really did wonder how exactly that went down, but knew much better than to ask.

J’onn extended out his hand for her to take. “You may call me Director Jones, if it is preferable,” he said, not an ounce of judgement in his voice, despite it feeling very much like a trap.

She took his hand, still, started to shake it. She had never been one to fuck up a name. She’d come from a background where most of her extended family had names your average suburban white American would stumble over and butcher. She knew better than that, even if her own name might not be that bad. “Director J’onzz, then,” she said, being careful to get the word as close as she could without whatever minor physical augmentations let him speak it with ease.

He looked at her, almost a bit taken aback, but was nodding not long after, something a bit kinder spilling over his features. “I’ve heard things about you,” he said, continuing the shake.

“Hopefully good?” She hedged, because unless he was dredging up her records from the police - which, very possible, director of the D.E.O. wasn’t exactly a title without some power behind it - that was going to have to come from Alex. Alex who she’d been on-and-off teasing for the last week and a half.

“Things,” he said, a twinkle of mirth in his eye, apparently very much enjoying his non-answer. He relinquished her hand, turning away, towards where Winn - she thought, anyway - was currently pelting Addy with rapid-fire questions that sounded vaguely English. Like, _close enough?_ Middle English that you could kinda pick bits out in every couple of sentences? But everything else was borderline gibberish.

“That is Agent Winn Schott., one of our trusted research personnel and field agents.” He turned away, gesturing towards the butch woman - Susan - who was now quickly speaking with Alex, glancing up her way every few seconds. “That is Agent Susan Vasquez, the current head of squad four, and another field agent.”

Susan broke away from Alex, gesturing vaguely behind her, and approached. She extended her hand out in her direction, a loose smile on her face. “Good to meet you,” she said.

Maggie took her hand, let it shake. Mirth flashed over Susan’s eyes, and she felt herself grin a bit. Just a little, to let her know she knew.

Kin recognizes kin, and all of that.

Susan released her hand, stepping back again, taking up J’onn’s left. Alex took up his right, one of the devices she had swiped from Winn held in the palm of her hand; a tablet of some kind. She was tapping away on it, pausing only to mutter something to herself.

J’onn, meanwhile, was looking at Winn, who was still bombarding Addy with questions. The language had, at this point, transitioned from scientific jargon to a lot of ‘is this a thing’ and Addy’s response being ‘I cannot tell you, I would lose my job’.

“Now that introductions are out of the way,” J’onn announced, pitching his voice to carry. Winn, a ways away, froze up, glancing back sheepishly. “I would like to—”

It was a horrendous noise, something genuinely demonic by her estimate. It started as trilling honks, muffled by someone’s pocket, and escalated into an orchestral composition, just one entirely made from differently-pitched honking. It sounded _oddly_ familiar, in the way that you can almost half-remember a commercial jingle if it’s played enough times and you don’t pay attention to it.

“...Addy,” Winn asked, after a moment. “Why is your ringtone one-winged angel, as composed by geese?”

Addy ignored him, reached hand into her pocket, and fished her phone out. The sound of it almost deafened the area, as loud as it was in a place that had rather good sound quality, though the ringtone was quickly lost as she swiped to answer the call.

“Hello?”

Unlike the ringtone, she couldn’t make anything out from the other side of the conversation, and Addy’s face was giving almost nothing away.

“No, that will be fine. We’re returning soon, and you said we acquired an alien toy to use it on?”

More silence, Addy’s eyes tracking up to the ceiling in a rather understated display of what Maggie was _pretty_ sure was annoyance.

“In that case, you are correct. My prototype may be the best choice, though I would recommend using your own first, Emil, as it is the closest to Lena’s.”

Her eyes rolled just a bit higher, and she started rocking on her foot, the annoyance now acquiring no small amount of impatience.

“...No. Everything is fine. Yes, I promise you I will inform you if there are any personal troubles. Yes, I understand I can speak to you about everything.” Another pause. “No, Serling is not at fault. Yes. Goodbye, Emil, I will see you in two days.”

She retrieved the phone from the side of her face, eyes turning back to it as she hung up. Finally, Addy spared them the time of day, looking in their direction. Her face went through a few minor twitches.

“To answer your question, my fans made it for me from the videos I compiled,” she said blandly, eyes turning to Winn. Next, they slid to Kara and Alex. “I also believe my coworkers have begun to notice my distance from Lena.”

“I hate to ask this,” Winn interrupted. “But, uh, _fans_?” There was something terribly close to worry on his face, though it was eclipsed by curiosity.

“Of my Twitter account, yes,” Addy confirmed easily, looking his way.

“How many, exactly?”

Addy frowned, blinking. “Three-hundred and sixty-nine thousand, four-hundred and thirty-two, as of the last time I checked.”

“For _geese_ ,” Winn stressed, disbelieving.

“People can appreciate many things, Winn,” Addy began, face pinching minutely. “Just because you cannot does not make that experience universal.”

Turning away, just to make sure she hadn’t been, god, pranked or in a bit or something, Maggie caught sight of J’onn watching the two of them with fondness, a twist of a smile on his otherwise grouchy, grumpy face.

A smile that faded as his eyes flicked from them to her, returning to a professional sort of look. “We will leave them to get things set up,” he said at last, turning fully away from the others. “Before then, however, I wish to speak to you in private.”

Maggie frowned, unsure. She was fairly certain she hadn’t done anything wrong, but... Well, what else could she say that wouldn’t grind this entire process to a halt? “Alright.”

J’onn nodded, said something quietly towards Alex, who begrudgingly began to walk over to Addy and Winn, before motioning her on.

With one last look at the people she came here with, Maggie departed after him.

* * *

The meeting room was sparse and still smelled like bleach, freshly cleaned of whatever had been here before them.

J’onn was a few paces away from the table, fishing a file out from one of the metal cabinets. It was a thick file, bracketed by brown covers and kept in one piece by a series of elastics. He turned back around, shutting the cabinet as he went, and arrived at the table, placing it down with a bit of a _smack_ , if only from the sheer weight of it.

Pulling out the nearest seat, he eased himself into it, pulled the elastics away, and flipped it open. The writing was upside down, so Maggie didn’t bother to try to decipher it, but it seemed like she didn’t need to. Not ten seconds later, he fished a page out from the folder and extended it towards her.

She took it, flipped it around, and stared at it.

 _D.E.O. LIAISON_ , it read in huge, blocky letters at the top of the page.

Maggie blinked up from it, stared across the table at J’onn.

“I want to offer you a job,” he explained, bluntly.

“I already have one,” she said, before she could really stop herself and try to phrase things in a way that would be polite enough not to throw the entire plan to the fire. “One that took a lot to get where I am now, I’m not particularly interested in leaving it.”

“You wouldn’t have to give it up,” he explained, reaching down to retrieve some more papers, pushing them forward and towards her.

She placed the cover sheet to the side, flipping the new pages around.

“The President believes that our department requires _change_ , and a lot of it,” J’onn began, sounding rather reluctant to admit any of this. “Currently, the D.E.O. mostly operates as a militarized organization, working for the defence of the planet and the capture of alien threats. This said, both due to past policy and ongoing internal politics, it has largely rendered our organization solely oriented on combat and containment. We do not have access to intelligence about aliens outside of the most dramatic, and we’re working from an angle that preconceived every alien we engage with to be hostile as a direct consequence.”

Maggie glanced up from the papers, feeling a bit unsteady. “And... what exactly are you doing about it?” Because, well, the reputation wasn’t _undeserved_.

“We intend to change angles, or rather, we have been ordered to. Peacekeeping is now the name of the game, containment will be a secondary interest, but we will no longer be emphasizing it or behaving as a strike team outside of circumstances where it is genuinely required. But to keep the peace, we must first arrive at it.” J’onn looked at her, felt like he was just about looking _through_ her, even. “You are not the only person we are offering this to, and there will likely be more than just one of you working this job, if you deign to take it. You would remain a detective, and your role here would be secondary, a role that is, mind you, government-approved.”

“Okay, but you’re still not telling me what you want me for,” she pointed out, glancing down at the papers. “Neither are these, really.” Most of it was legalese, contracts and more than a few pointed talks of a high-end salary. Money made the world go round, even in situations like these.

“You will be acting as an intermediary between ourselves and your police department, as well as working with community outreach,” J’onn explained, pushing over a few more pages as he did. “We would provide you access to utilities and other things as required, and your role would mainly be playing a part in helping us decide where and when we must step in, what we should be looking out for, as well as ongoing trends or situations that we do not know about. You would also play a part in deciding whether or not certain aliens will be released from our care.”

“This seems really abrupt, though,” Maggie cut in. The idea sounded good—a strong-armed push for change in some of the worst government agencies for aliens? That was _good_. But change wasn’t this fast. “I’m not going to be spying on the alien community and my department for you, if this is what all of this is.”

J’onn’s lips pinched together, his hands folded in front of him. For a second, it looked like that’s _what_ this was. Finally, he reached up, breathing out a low sigh. “The D.E.O. is currently facing an unprecedented problem,” he explained, each word slow. “When Cadmus went rogue, what aliens captive they could not reacquire were left as-is. Many of these captives were not aliens we, personally, had tracked down, but rather civilians, among others.”

Something heavy and cold fell into her stomach.

“Most of these captives have been abused, have been tortured, and are almost universally traumatized. Some of them have been...” J’onn’s face twisted, disgust curling his lip in a startling show of emotion for a man who revealed very little. “ _Modified_ , for use as weapons, or as disposable troops otherwise. Our current systems are not even remotely acceptable to accommodate them, and it frankly couldn’t survive the influx of over a thousand aliens, many of whom are _extremely_ hostile to humans and groups such as ours, justifiably so, considering how they have been treated.”

“You have the testing victims,” Maggie said, the words falling out of her mouth like loose teeth. Horror swam in the back of her head. “A _thousand?_ ”

“At least,” J’onn confirmed across from her. “Possibly more, up to twice that, we are still finding new bases, not to even mention the number of aliens they have still kept in captivity.”

The alien community had always asserted someone was tracking down the civilians, the ones who did nothing wrong, and disappearing them. There was evidence for it, both in the way that certain species - generally the ‘stronger’ ones - were targeted, and in the fact that these incidents were usually caused in bursts. It wasn’t that one person would go missing, it was that five or six would in one night, and then months later it would happen again.

There had people who said they’d seen their family members, their brothers, sisters, _cousins_ , with the kidnappers, just... twisted, fitted with metal or wearing exoskeletal armour that kept them contained.

The main reason why not _everyone_ had believed it was that, well, alien communities generally were off the grid back then. No ability to go to the police, little or no job opportunities if you couldn’t pass or get a _very_ good image projector, among other things. It was common that aliens fell into criminal activities to pay the bills, especially gangs, and it was always heads or tails if an abduction was a black-ops organization or a gang trying to ransom someone for money or something else.

This was why the push was so strong, then. It wasn’t just that the government was dealing with a runaway agency, it was that the government was dealing with potentially thousands of human rights violations and experimentation on sentient beings.

“It’s not just them,” J’onn continued, when she said nothing. “The President has decided, with this new rehabilitation process we’re building, that we are to extend the same offer to select Fort Rozz escapees that we have reacquired over the years. The ones who we feel are safe to allow back into normal society. Before now, we had a policy for certain types of Fort Rozz escapees—a ‘look the other way’ way of thinking. In a sense, so long as the alien was not in there for charges such as murder, rape, or things like it, weren’t actively participating in said crimes now, and we could be sure that they were stable enough for it, we would not actively attempt to track them down.”

“But you would still arrest them,” Maggie pointed out.

J’onn nodded. “Protocol, at the time. As I said, the D.E.O. is, in a sense, the military and containment arm of the government’s supernatural response branches. We were heavily involved in the politics of other branches such as Cadmus, and had policies shaped by working with them. In the case of my forebear, this led to a habit of funnelling captives to Cadmus after they were done with them.”

Glancing down at the pages in front of her, she shuffled through them, looked over the words and saw them reflected back to her in what J’onn said, if muddled by legalese. She glanced up, feeling a frown deepen on her face. “Why me?” she asked at last.

Because it didn’t make a lot of sense. She might’ve been in National City for a year and had some experience when it came to handling the supernatural and otherwise, but... this felt too abrupt. It felt like a trap, or a misguided decision.

“We’ve already vetted you,” J’onn said, flat. Which made sense, considering the telepaths. “And I had to choose somebody, and you seemed best qualified to temper kindness with practical awareness of the situation. I’ve read your file, I’ve looked over your reports, I’ve tracked you back to the day that your father left you with your aunt.”

Maggie felt her face harden. “That is personal baggage you’re airing there.”

“It reflects _well_ on you, that you could go through all of that and come out of it still hopeful,” J’onn reminded her, his voice tight. Regret, or maybe shame, twisted into his tone. “And when I must make a decision, I prefer to be very selective with who I take in. I know more than enough about the damage of people pretending to be helpful, when they only wish to hurt.”

“Considering you’re offering to give me basically my police salary _again_ , for a job that I can do alongside my own, you don’t sound particularly interested in any of this. Not alien rehabilitation or the change to your department,” she noted, finding the words a bit cold, a bit harsh, but considering he’d brought up the fact that her father had kicked her to the curbside when he found out she liked women, she thought it was fair she dig her heels in a bit too.

J’onn acknowledged it with a bow of his head, fingers playing over the pages in the folder as he flipped through it. “I do not agree with most of this,” he said at last. “But I understand its purpose and intent.”

“And why not?” She pressed, watching as his eyes came up to meet her own, narrow slightly.

Then the anger was gone, and J’onn was leaning back, sighing. “How much do you know about intergalactic politics?”

That was a bit of a segue. “Enough.”

His form flickered, red pulsing through the air. It formed the still image of another being, superimposed over the man before her. Taller than any human, with green skin, a bald head, and a tense expression. It lingered for a few seconds before the image itself flaked away, red motes pulling apart, fading into the background.

“I am J’onn J'onzz, a Green Martian,” he explained, drawing her eyes back down. She felt her stomach twist, her brain freeze, because most people assumed every last one of them was _dead_. “I know very well how bad some aliens can be. My kind were eradicated by them, wholeheartedly and with _great_ glee. I am, very likely, the last of my kind, and I do not wish my fate for this world.”

“But White Martians peddle that rhetoric,” Maggie found herself saying, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “They’re religious, violently xenophobic isolationists. Do you want that for Earth?”

He shook his head. “You’ve touched on how I can understand _why_ this is needed. I feel like we’re doing this much too early, but I can recognize the signs, the symptoms, of that rot. So can the President, it would seem. We have seen what happens with an agency with power adopts xenophobic ideals and breaks from the government. Cadmus is a tangible threat to everyone’s livelihoods, and they need to be handled, and with them any other groups which may eventually rise to replace them.

“That said, I am also aware of the fact that White Martians are unlikely to appreciate or approve of humans entering the intergalactic scene. Drawing attention to our out-of-the-way sector is likely to bring their wrath upon us, because White Martians cannot be regularly threatened in diplomatic talks. They export their violence and hatred out to the world at large, and get away with it because they are in a part of the galaxy that most people consider largely devoid of sentient life. I believe it’s a bad idea to be entering this age, a transitory period all alien species have to go through, before we can reasonably protect ourselves from what is out there.”

Maggie found herself without much to say in response to that, just staring at the man across from her. Now he looked _tired_ , weary, like most of this was a fight to get out and he’s started to realize that he was losing regardless.

“The decision comes down to whether or not our isolation from the alien community at large will breed more problems like Cadmus, now that there is knowledge of aliens that is fairly public, or if entering the intergalactic community largely unprepared and scientifically primitive will cause the downfall of the Earth as other civilizations subsequently take advantage of us.” He folded his hands together again, tensed them, knuckles pressing against his skin. “I voted that the latter was the larger danger, but I can acknowledge and accept that my peers believe the former is. At this point, our intent is to go through with integration and join the intergalactic community as soon as we can. All I can do now is prepare.”

For a while, neither of them said anything. J’onn’s judgement hung like an unpleasant gloom over the talk, and she was itching to leave the room, to just try to process the fact that, in her lifetime, it was very possible Earth may become interconnected like planets she had heard of. Civilizations meeting civilizations, aliens having legal representation in the world. It felt both far-fetched and almost realistic, just from the way he put it.

“So...” Maggie swallowed, tried to push the dryness of her mouth away. “What do you want to know, out of this? What would you specifically want from me, that you cannot get from someone else?”

“The D.E.O., as mentioned, lacks credible sources for basic knowledge of the goings-on in space. We do not acquire rumours because people are unlikely to speak to us, and when they do, they normally lie. We do not know the status of the universe outside of this as a consequence. My own personal knowledge of the galaxy is outdated by approximately three hundred years, and I doubt much, if any of it, holds up to the present circumstances.”

Maggie reached up, glancing down and away from J’onn to look over the pages. She rubbed at her face, tried to work the ache out that was building between her eyes. There was nothing here he hadn’t said, nothing that seemed liable to trap her, but...

“You don’t need to accept it now,” J’onn offered, and reminded her that she was sitting in a room with a _Martian_ , and that meant telepathy.

“Let me think on it?” She requested at last. “This is a pretty big decision.”

J’onn nodded, rising up from his seat. “I would expect nothing less.”

* * *

The dynamics of a federal agency on the cusp of going public and dealing with the eventual integration of humanity into the greater intergalactic community was, to be blunt, not Maggie’s area of expertise. It was, if anything, probably the damn near opposite of it. It wasn’t her element, it wasn’t where she was comfortable.

She still felt unmoored, the words clattering around in her head like a bubblegum machine. Dispense coin, get thought, just these thoughts had no rhyme or reason. Should she, or shouldn’t she? This was an opportunity to shape the early days of intergalactic diplomacy, and to also hopefully help out people who have been wronged by the system. That was damn near half the reason she’d gotten into the police - if more to the latter point, less so the former, considering the circumstances - and the other half of that had been spite, mostly directed at her father.

Thankfully, she could take all of those thoughts and concerns and shove them beneath the throw rug that her brain oftentimes felt like. She might’ve not been in her element before, but she could find her footing now.

Across from her, Alex and Addy stood at the other end of a table. The table itself was a digital screen, depicting a map of National City, covered in multicoloured pins, the atlas for what-meant-what almost as long as the map was, with archaic designations for specific things, but still being surprisingly neat, all things considered.

Kara and Winn were at the other sides of the table, looking over the details themselves, while J’onn prowled out in front of the table, hands clasped behind his back.

“Detective Sawyer,” he started, and if that didn’t feel _good_ in a way that washed away all the awkward hesitation she felt, she’d call herself straight. “Would you care to give us some insight into what we might be facing?”

Heads turned to look at her, eyes inquisitive, curious. This was where her talents lay, or at least where some of them did. Guidance, explanation, planning, strategy, deductive reasoning? She’d been hired for a reason, and it sure as shit wasn’t because she was a non-white lesbian, she could tell you that much.

Stepping forward, she felt the confidence step back into rhythm with her. Something she could navigate, something she could do. She hated presentations in school, but now she actually kinda liked them.

Glancing down at the map, she found a lot of the pins she’d tracked down on there too. Actually, all the ones she’d tracked down were there, even. Huh.

“When it comes to the operation itself, Roulette is the lynchpin. Her real name is Veronica Sinclair, she just prefers Roulette, because that’s the type of drama she enjoys. Let it be said, though, that dramatic personality doesn’t translate to anything even remotely resembling empathy. She is cruel, she is driven by profit, and she thinks little of any life perhaps maybe her own. She built an enterprise _around_ herself, a strict hierarchy, with her at the top, and only a handful of people who she gives even meagre power. This keeps her safe, she has near absolute, dictatorial control of everything that goes on, and makes it so that people can’t overthrow her, but it also leaves the entire franchise hinging on her existence. Nothing happens without her say, and she controls all the pieces; take her down properly, get it to stick, and her entire racket goes under.”

They were watching her raptly, with attention wholly focused on herself. This actually felt _good_ , this was what she’d wanted when she stepped in here. To get prepared, to get ready, to take the woman down, not talk about potentially being involved with something like this.

“The one group she gives any amount of power to is the one she employs more directly, named Demolition Team. They’re made up of people Roulette pays a lot of money for, and who she dresses up in the best gear she can find, with some gimmicks.

“At the top of the Demolition Team, you have Rosie. She’s got a nail gun that fires unstoppable projectiles, I believe taken from an alien construction tool that you find in orbital construction lots. She’s confident, clever, and keeps the rest of her gang under her control, so don’t underestimate her. Below her, the lieutenant of the gang is Hardhat. We’ve tracked him back to past cartel work, but not much further than that, because he’s _paranoid_. He’s been equipped with bits of Trombusan power armour, mostly the torso and head, which is enough to make him hit like a truck and be nearly impossible to injure.

“After that, you have the rest of the gang. Jackhammer is cold, cynical, and the most likely to break and run when things go south, but the fact that he has an alien warhammer that creates seismic waves and disruptions means it’s unlikely to _get_ bad for anyone but his enemies. Scoopshovel is, as far as we can tell, the engineer of the group with the best understanding of the tech everyone uses, and comes equipped with a hydraulic construction arm, again of alien make, which has a shovel-like head on it that can cut through anything. We don’t understand how it works, it just does. He hits harder than Hardhat, so consider only throwing those of us who are nearly impervious to damage against him, in the event of a fight. Finally, there’s Steamroller, their getaway driver; he’s hostile, angry at the world, and reckless. Unfortunately, someone thought it was smart to give him an alien construction vehicle with short-ranged terraforming capabilities, and that’s about the end of that.”

The group made faces at the end there, especially Addy, who looked almost personally offended by the notion.

“But most of Roulette’s goons aren’t like these guys,” Maggie continued, eyes turning back to her. “Most of them aren’t equipped with the best tech humanity can get. They’re aliens and humans who are there for specific reasons or resources Roulette herself can provide them.

“There are three types of aliens, and more generally, _people_ who work for Roulette: the desperate, the genuinely awful, and the mercenaries. The desperate are made up almost entirely of aliens, and fighting them will always be difficult. They’re cornered animals, picked up off the streets by bullshit promises and kept servile because they think they will be put away forever if they’re caught. Most of them had limited knowledge of customs on this planet, and were basically forced into working for her, and now have no way out. They will fight you, tooth and nail, to avoid being captured, and come in a variety of species, though Roulette has a certain soft-spot for the immensely physically powerful, such as the Udinath.

“The awful are made up of those who, as the name suggests, are in it because they can be. These are your Fort Rozz escapees, aliens fleeing intergalactic laws in an abandoned part of the galaxy, and can be found almost anywhere. If you’ve seen an alien wagering their physiology for profit in a gang? You know the type of person I’m speaking of. These aliens are generally not grouped together, though, a lot of them are independents, and even more of them don’t trust in groups. As far as we can tell, this leads to friction, especially as aliens bounce between different opportunities and may have to work with people they were at one point tasked to put in the dirt.

“That leaves us, finally, with the mercenaries. Both human and alien mercenaries are common, though it’s more humans than aliens as of this moment. Hired gangs are the name of the game for Roulette, as they’re cheap, disposable, and easily swayed by bright and flashy but generally low-costing weapons. She has some professional groups working for her, or at least working _with_ her, such as Intergang, CYCLOPS, and Les Mille Yeux, to name a few. They’re expensive, though, so anyone she’s hiring from them is in small squads, groups of three to five at most.

“Alien mercenaries, by sheer volume, are more varied. As far as the NCPD has been able to ascertain, alien mercenaries have been paying a large amount of attention to Earth as we become more aware, and have started offering their services. The Syndicate is the only one we know of currently that’s worked actively with Roulette, however they may not qualify as ‘mercenaries’, more like opportunistic criminals in general.”

Leaning back, she watched the faces of the others as they processed this. It wasn’t hard to see what they had known, and what they hadn’t, as evidenced by varied expressions and concern.

“The fact of the matter is that without a very concrete idea of what we’re facing, it’s suicide to go after her. She keeps a lot of these groups in waiting, usually at fallback points, and will lead you right into a kill box if you chase after her when she leaves.” Maggie looked at each of them in turn, Addy giving her an especially considering look. “As a result, our plan is to go in for scouting. Mainly, three or four people will have to go to one of her venues, get a lay of the land, and acquire information. Goals include finding weaknesses, observing her defences, and possibly compromise a few people for later blackmail, as well as to see what she has in terms of stock nowadays.

“In the event of your identities being figured out, the backup plan would be to keep to cover, as the lasers she sells don’t tend to be kinetic, but rather cutting weapons, and keep in the crowd. Roulette cherishes her reputation a lot, and doesn’t let the gangs fire on anyone that might get one of her buyers hurt. She sells to the absurdly wealthy, even one of them could cause significant damage to her business. I assume backup would arrive ASAP, right?”

J’onn, across from her, nodded.

“In the event you’re singled out and cannot find cover, I’m going to need you to play her game,” Maggie continued, now that that was established. “Keep her occupied, and signal, somehow, that things have gone to shit. Roulette has an ego, and stroking it is the only way to avoid a hail of lethal lasers. Keep her on her toes, keep her _interested_ or at least gloating, and she’s more than likely to make a show out of you. Grovel if you must, you want to avoid giving her a reason to not indulge herself in theatrics and just kill you instead.”

“That just leaves us to decide who will go in,” Alex commented, frowning. “I’m not sure the exact criteria for this, though. You said it’s fancy?”

Maggie nodded. “Fancy wear, ideally we’d want a telepath—Addy or your boss would do. Compromising people becomes easier when you don’t have to make a guess. I’ll be coming along as well, as this is _my_ mission. Whoever did go would need to know how to be highly particular about etiquette, and act like the rich and wealthy.”

Just about the majority of the table glanced towards Addy, who was idly poking at her phone. As though she could feel the looks, she glanced up, blinking. “Apologies, I was having correspondence with Serling, who was aggravated by the notion that she could have, to quote, ‘bullied me’, on the fact that I am, supposedly, ‘unable to be bullied, you have no patience for it’, end-quote.”

Well, that certainly established that, then.

“Addy, then,” Alex said, nodding along.

“In that case, I would prefer if we had someone good at handling undercover operations, and someone who, if push comes to absolute shove, can throw their weight around.”

At that, Alex looked at Kara, Kara looked at Alex, and Addy just looked mostly confused.

“I believe I am plenty strong enough for that,” she said, affronted.

Maggie quietly added ‘super strength’ to the increasingly long list of associated traits she’d compiled about Addy. Flight, telepathy, super strength, not exactly an uncommon combination.

“Alex and I?” Kara offered, looking back towards her.

Maggie nodded. “Then that’s about as many people as we can bring before someone starts asking questions.”

“In that case,” J’onn cut in. “I will be the operation lead on this, and maintain a reserve of D.E.O. agents in the event of you becoming compromised. Until then, however, I believe you may have to collect some suitable clothing, correct?”

“...I mean,” Maggie hedged, looking between the three of them. “You all have a fancy dress or something tucked away for a rainy day, right?”

Alex pointedly looked away, fidgeting. Kara made an awkward, embarrassed face, reaching up to fiddle with her glasses.

Addy stared at her like she’d grown a second, or maybe even a third head. “Why would I wear a _dress_?” She asked, sounding horrified by the notion.

...Well then. “You don’t have to wear a _dress_ , just fancy clothing. Something formal, this isn’t, you know, a casual setting.”

“Oh,” Addy breathed, blinking. “In which case, no, I do not have any. Nor can I borrow any of Kara’s, as she set them on fire.”

What.

“I thought we agreed to not talk about that,” Kara said, face red and nearly squirming in place.

Addy blinked, visibly pondering that. “I think we merely agreed not to talk about the violence.”

So she was probably going to have to remedy that, huh.

* * *

She took it back. Addy was, in every way, shape or form, the opposite of domesticated. Actual, literal wild animals were better domesticated than she was.

It was night, and after a long day of using up federal money to buy undercover outfits, Maggie honestly just wanted to _sleep_. Alex and Kara? Easy enough to find things _they_ found comfortable. Kara was a surprising change of pace, as she’d not defaulted to a pastel dress like she’d expect, and instead went for a full suit. Mind you, it looked great on her, and fit her frame well - she was hiding a suspicious amount of muscle beneath layers of pastel middle-aged woman clothing - but it had still been a surprise nonetheless.

Alex had been blessedly easier. If it was black, strappy, and covered enough skin? She’d be into it.

Addy, though?

A nightmare.

Trying to get her into a dress was already a no-go, but suits were too uniform, and they weren’t taking her to the venue in a pink suit with white trim, regardless of how much she pointed out its usefulness. After four separate stores and an increasingly annoyed godlike telepath making unsubtle barbs at her expense, they’d finally, _finally_ come to a decent enough outfit that wouldn’t make her look like the goddamn pink panther.

Addy was outfitted in black dress pants, a white shirt tucked into it, one of those vests she’d only ever called a ‘butch vest’ in her head, the ones with the triangle-shaped hems, dress shoes, and a blank white mask. She’d rolled her shirt up to her elbows, and had at some point managed to acquire a pair of white gloves to go along with the ensemble.

She looked, well, decent.

Maggie herself had gotten a dress from her closet, like a normal person, instead of _quietly admitting_ that she’d set her clothes on fire in a fit of ‘inhibitionless pique’ - Kara - or telling her flat-out she’d cleaned out her shelves for anything that ‘couldn’t double as combat wear in a pinch’ after she gave up on dating a few years ago - _Alex_ , good lord - and, just.

No, she was starting to understand that she might have gotten in a bit too deep on things.

Thankfully, however, this would eventually come to a fruitful end. They were at the venue, they just had to survive the evening, get some information, and _get out_ , and they could revisit the situation the next time she opened up shop and hopefully by then, someone will have taken the three of them by their ears to buy the basic necessities expected for a person and—just...

Lord. Their problems had problems. Like how whales can get cancer and then that cancer can get cancer, so it almost balances itself out and stops being harmful? Yeah, that. The impression of stability and normalcy when really it’s just that all of the abnormal things they did blended together until what came out looked kinda normal, from a distance, if you squinted and weren’t in hearing range.

But, still. They’d gotten there. After hours of bickering and arguing and trying very hard not to look at Alex too closely when she was wearing a tight dress. They had made it.

The venue was a warehouse, and there were more than a few people here. Dozens of people milled out around the front, all in similar apparel to them. Everyone wore a mask of some kind, masquerade style for the most part, with Victorian flourishes to most things.

Glancing back at the rest of the team, she looked them over. Addy was in her outfit, Alex was wearing that midnight-black dress with a black half-mask, and Kara was in her suit, wearing a bit of a gilded porcelain mask she’d fished out an antique shop, somehow. She was brought on for her ability to notice things, and, well, if that was an actual alien ability? That at least cut off some species, like Kryptonians.

Imagine that, a Kryptonian doing undercover work.

The big man in Metropolis barely understood the idea of subtlety. Supergirl seemed mostly the same, if a bit more subdued, thankfully.

The warehouse itself was fairly large, one of the decommissioned Luthor Corp ones, by her estimate. It had lights strung up and around its surface, and the only entrance to the thing - a set of large metal doors - were bracketed by a pair of very alien bouncers. Green, amphibian-like skin stuck out from beneath the comically ill-sized suits they were wearing on bodies the size and shape of a fridge.

The rest of the people waiting outside seemed in no hurry to enter, still making small talk with others, but seeing as they had a job to do, they ought to actually do it. Sparing a glance back towards the other three that had come with her, Maggie turned and walked her way up to the bouncers, reaching into her purse to fish out the invitation they’d acquired from a rather wealthy man who they had enough dirt on to bury him with.

God, the rich and famous, so polite when they’re caught with their pants down. Quite literally.

The bouncers looked her little group over, the right one extending his hand. His fingers were webbed, and clawed, and covered in what looked like octopus pads of a sort. Still, she handed the letter over to him, watched him peel the covering away and unfold it in its entirety.

His eyes slid across the page, then flickered up at the four of them. He grunted, making an odd, song-like noise, his partner responding by reaching out to press the door open with one meaty, frog-like hand.

“Enjoy yer time,” the one with the letter croaked, sounding an awful lot like he was hiccuping each word out.

Stepping through, Maggie was struck by that faint sense of bitter familiarity. It didn’t look any different from the venue that had taken off Craig’s arm. Roulette had gone through the processes for this one, stripping the warehouse down and building it back up again with what appeared to be stuffed she stripped out of a theatre. A wooden stage, red velvet curtains, rows upon rows of seating, and a lighting system that illuminated the center of the stage unerringly.

There were a lot more people inside than there were outside. Both humans and aliens, though not a single alien was among the mask wearers, and not a single human among the labourers. The rich and wealthy of America - not just National City - stood around, sipping from wine glasses and speaking casually with one another, while aliens scrambled between groups, carrying platters or displays for people to observe.

On the stage itself, she saw Roulette. The woman looked as she always did: tall and painfully leggy. She had a red dress on that split down the thigh, showing off a circular snake tattoo that curled its way up her body, vanishing back beneath the hem of the fabric. Her black hair fell in a straight wave down her back, and her eyes were narrowed, but her cherry-coloured smile easy and inviting.

Fanned out around her were the Demolition Team, everyone but Steamroller accounted for. Rosie stood right next to Roulette, the nail gun held in one hand while she pointed out things among the crowd, getting softly-spoken replies from Roulette. Elsewhere, aliens on the stage moved things into place, boxes and guns, among other things.

“The show’s about to start,” Maggie said, glancing back towards the rest of them. Addy’s eyes were a bit distant, her head slowly scanning across the crowd, and Kara was leaned slightly up against her. “Let's find our seats, yeah?”

Their seats turned out to be a few rows back, but relatively close to the main stage itself. They were seated in a line, with Addy at the far left, Kara to her right, Alex to _her_ right, and Maggie herself at the far right. The couple of people they were seated next to were clustered mostly on the left, leaving a married couple to compliment Addy’s choice in ‘metrosexual clothing’ and ‘how much they liked the androgyny look’.

Addy’s response to that was complete and total silence, apparently deciding the best course of action was to ignore the nuisance until it went away. Probably because she had something to occupy herself with, what with her job being getting names and faces for everyone who went to one of these.

Still, the chatter from the couple slowly faded out, and gradually the aliens began to disperse. The lights to the warehouse began to dim considerably, while the spotlight on the stage intensified, drawing the eye even more.

Roulette stepped up to the mic, a sultry smile plastered across her face. It was a wonder anyone thought it was genuine. “Good evening, everybody, and welcome to our latest gun show.”

There was some polite tittering in the crowd, soft claps.

“We’ve made a lot of progress since we started working on this project, even despite the greater efforts of our local police force.” She leaned back, a smug look on her face, raising a hand up like she was holding an invisible glass. “A toast, to our finest.”

Maggie felt her blood just about boil, simmer in her veins like acid.

The crowd laughed.

“Nevertheless, we’ve managed to get a lot _done_. We have someone helping us uncover the secrets of this technology in record time, all for your consumption.” She walked away from the mic, extending an arm out to the crowd, waving it across. “After all, it’s only right that alien technology gets repurposed, no? For our safety, for the safety of our _world_. We have this opportunity to be ahead of the curve, to take this technology and give it to people who can use it _responsibly_.”

She paused, a smile broadening on her face. “...and for some _pleasure_ , of course,” she finished, utterly smug.

Behind her, the members of the Demolition Team emerged, suited up in their tech. Hardhat was pushing a cloth-covered, box-shaped thing on wheels into the center stage, while an alien scurried over to hand a long, lengthy alien rifle to Roulette. She turned around, and in turn, handed it to Rosie, who tipped her construction hat in mock thanks.

The rifle itself was one of those alien rifles where _alien_ came across very thoroughly. It was uniform dark purple and looked almost slick, organic, even if she had a good idea that it wasn’t. The barrel was long, and ended in the material branching out like an arbour, forming a stock to rest against the shoulder.

Hardhat stepped away, grabbing the cloth as he went and pulling it free from the cage. Inside was something that might, abstractly, resemble a deer. It had roughly the same shape, except it had fangs in its mouth, and no horns, and its body was not covered in fur, but rather something like hexagonal scales that shimmered in the light.

“This is a Terna,” Roulette explained, turning towards the creature. “One of the most common alien _animals_ , if you’d call it that, in the greater universe. They’re carnivorous creatures from a planet by the name of Liy. It is hilariously invasive, as it is capable of adapting to nearly any environment, and is prone to eating people out of house and home. Literally. They spit acid.”

Off to the side, Maggie spotted Kara shaking her head. Catching her gaze, briefly, the blonde leaned towards her.

“Terna only get this way when threatened,” she whispered, a low murmur. “They were engineered by researchers of Liy who wanted to make a form of livestock or semi-grazing wild animal which could exist wherever, as Liy is a highly variable planet in terms of climate due to its size. It mostly served for rich hunting parties. The acid? It only kicks in when it’s threatened and it’s adapting. Also, they’re omnivorous, not carnivorous, opportunistic may be a better word. They can eat anything, but they prefer plants because they don’t fight back.”

Digesting that for a moment, Maggie spared a glance back at the animal. Drool dripped from its mouth, hissing as it met the metal floor of its prison, steaming wildly as it bubbled and gnawed through alien materials meant to contain it.

She still wouldn’t want to take her bets with it, regardless of how informative that was.

“Rosie, _darling_ ,” Roulette drawled, glancing her way. “Show our guests how we intend to stop something like this from running wild on our planet.”

Rosie levelled the rifle up, fit her hand into a hidden opening beneath it. She adjusted her stance, spread her legs, and leaned forward to look down the sights. The tip of the gun flickered, lines opening up along the purple material before it unfolded, rapidly, into separate parts. The device recombined, collected into something more akin to a cannon.

“With something like this?” Roulette said, in a drawl. “You won’t have to worry.”

The cannon fired, a raw kick of noise and force as a beam about as thick as an oak tree launched from the opening. It went through the cage, through the animal, and pulped it into a shower of blue-orange gore like it’d just been hit by an eighteen-wheeler going highway speeds.

The crowd around her applauded, some sounding giddy as they called out for more.

Addy flinched, suddenly, her head whipping around to one of the walls just next to the stage. Maggie saw Kara and Alex look her way, confused.

Then, of course, the wall exploded. A shower of dust and large chunks of rock and metal flew away, scattering across the stage as Roulette recoiled, was grabbed by Hardhat and pulled out of the line of fire.

A man floated in through the hole, equipped in green and black spandex. His skin was dark, and his face was only really covered by a domino mask, leaving all those familiar features absolutely open and bare for her to see.

Jesus fuck. _John_?

Green energy collected around his hand, shaped itself into a spearhead of a kind, a long, narrow stabbing implement. He stared down Roulette, who now had the Demolition Team in front of her, their weapons primed and ready.

“Where. Is. My. _Lantern?_ ”

Like a gunshot, that was the cue for everyone to bolt. The crowd erupted into screaming as people scrambled from their seats, trying to escape. The Demolition Team turned on the guy in spandex and opened fire, Rosie, in particular, firing a half-dozen nails in his direction, which he swerved and avoided. He kept out of the range of the ones below him, neither Hardhat nor Scoopshovel having the chance to get near enough to him to hit him.

What the fuck. What _the fuck_. What the fuck was John Stewart doing here, why wasn’t he in, like, Gotham or whatever fucking base he’d been stored in, and more importantly, _why was he wearing spandex and fly_ —

A hand wrapped around her arm, yanked her to her feet.

Alex, staring back at her, was pulling her away. “We have to go!”

Kara was nowhere to be seen, whereas Addy was fixedly staring at John. The mask she wore covered any expression, but Maggie had the unsettling thought she almost looked... hungry?

Christ, her head was a mess.

Lasers erupted from somewhere in the warehouse, searing across the walls and narrowly missing taking John’s head off. She didn’t get to see much else, as Alex dragged her _and_ Addy away, pulling them back out towards the exit, where the bouncers were already waving people out hurriedly.

Maggie spared another look behind her, just in time to see Supergirl quite literally smash through the ceiling - rather convenient that she was in the neighbourhood - the Demolition Team scatter, as one does when a Kryptonian gets involved, and Roulette to already be missing from the picture.

Drawn out into the outside, she heard the telltale wail of sirens as D.E.O. vans converged on the point, the rich and famous fleeing into the dirty, grimy alleyways surrounding the warehouse, trying to escape arrest.

To reiterate: _what the fuck_.

* * *

Her heel tapped repeatedly against the ground, unable to be stopped even if Maggie had been fairly certain she’d outgrown this nervous tic in eighth grade.

They were back at the D.E.O., still in their fancy clothes, debriefing. J’onn was at the head of the table, with Kara standing next to him. Addy was looking stubbornly at the map on the table, lips pursed, and Alex was...

She glanced around.

...Leading a platoon of agents, carrying what they managed to find at the venue site, as well as about a half-dozen morons who hadn’t been able to run quick enough from the police.

Separating from the platoon, looking a bit absurd leading them around in a strappy dress that wouldn’t look out of place at a rave, Alex approached quickly if stubbornly. “Alright, who was _that_?” she asked, folding her arms carefully across her chest.

Kara looked from Alex to J’onn, hesitating. “A Green Lantern,” she said, at last.

Alex gave her a blank look.

Kara grimaced, looking away. “Green Lanterns are the impartial judges and an essential part of the intergalactic peacekeeping forces. They respond to threats or catastrophes, both in terms of literal and more legal things, like genocides, and attempt to step in to prevent them. They’re lawmen, given powers by, well, a ring of power and a lantern. They fuel their powers through emotions, in the Green Lantern Corps’ case, willpower. They exist as they do to ensure justice is served properly, and to do so without political ties for the most part.”

“What do you mean by lanterns?” Alex probed.

“All power rings utilize a lantern to recharge their abilities,” J’onn explained. “They speak an oath to it, draw energy from it to their ring through their willpower, and must recharge it semi-regularly if they’re using it with much frequency. We hadn’t heard of a Green Lantern, and they’re fairly distinctive, so it’s unlikely he has. If he doesn’t have his, though, it would make sense, as he’ll run out of energy eventually.”

“But why is he human?” Alex asked, again with furrowed brows. “Humans aren’t involved in the galactic scene yet, not really.”

“We don’t know that he is,” J’onn pointed out. “Plenty of alien species resemble humans and vice-versa.”

“There was a Green Lantern on Fort Rozz,” Kara interrupted.

Everyone turned to look at her, and her face was twisted into something halfway to a grimace.

“He was put there to ensure nothing untoward happened on the ship, considering how isolated it was. I think they were cycled in and out for year-long stays. I...” she trailed off, lips pursing. “Non was always very particular about Green Lanterns, so was Aunt Astra. They saw them as a force for good. I don’t think he would’ve killed him.”

“But?” J’onn asked, leadingly.

“But it’s not out of the question that he took the lantern and ring away after they took control of the ship,” Kara explained tightly, almost gnawing on her lip. “Part of how Green Lanterns work is that the rings seek out those who are worthy of them, and killing him would only give the ring to the political prisoners on Fort Rozz, who may actively threaten his control of the ship. So he probably put the Green Lantern somewhere safe, somewhere he probably kept the rest of the guards who surrendered so they wouldn’t be killed by the inmates. I... imagine he probably died, when the ship crashed into National City, and the ring got passed off to the nearest person who best fits its criteria.”

This was... what had John gotten himself _into_? Maggie reached up, dragged a hand down her face, tried to breathe. She knew that face, knew that _voice_. She’d worked extensively with him in Gotham, back when the National Guard had gotten called in. She knew John, knew his problems with the system, and she’d - maybe misguidedly - thought he was going to do something else with his life, after all of that.

Something nonviolent, something that didn’t mean turning away the sick and hungry.

“So now we have a human with a power ring, but a missing lantern, and one who is likely going to draw the attention of other members of the corps soon enough,” J’onn said, tiredly.

“He didn’t seem to be actually using it,” Addy interrupted, speaking up for the first time since the incident took place. “Conserving energy behaviour is noticeable, I happen to pattern myself off of it. The construct he made around his hand was made with energy efficiency in mind, by the fact that it was undetailed and condensed and kept close to his body, possibly to avoid energy leak.”

“It could be a sign he’s nearly out of energy, possibly,” J’onn conceded, lips pursed. “He hasn’t gotten any official training, by my bet, and if he’s tracking his lantern somehow, he needs it. We have to investigate this, but until then, there isn’t much we can do. I ask that everyone here keeps an eye out for this new Green Lantern, and tries their best to at least get a line of conversation going with him. His aid would be much appreciated, and give a degree of official relevance to our work.”

“I’ll keep a lookout for him,” Maggie blurted, rising to her feet. “But I have to go. I need to speak with someone, this seems fairly big.”

J’onn looked at her, looked her dead in the eye. He probably already knew John’s identity, but in a show of trust, in a show of compassion, he just... nodded. Didn’t ask questions even as everyone else in the room turned to look at her oddly. He could’ve just reached in, learned what he needed to. But either he did and wasn’t saying, or he hadn’t, and was giving her the benefit of the doubt.

“All I ask is that you get back to me on my offer soon,” J’onn said, softly.

“I will.” She was going to fucking have to, though at this rate her plate was already feeling a bit full for it.

* * *

Tracking John Stewart down was much less difficult than it probably should be.

She’d changed out of that dress and into clothes she could move more easily in, and wouldn’t look out of place in the shitty apartment he was living out of. She cleared the steps leading up to his floor two at a time, cursing beneath her breath at his decision to park his ass in one of the most outlying parts of National City.

Arriving at the floor, the long hallway that stretched down it, she passed by the first two doors, turned to the left, and started wailing on the third one with her closed fist.

There was a muffled sound inside, someone stumbling.

Nope. Her patience was officially gone. “John!” She barked. “You open this damn door or so help me I will—”

Her next slam missed, hitting open air as one tired-looking John Stewart, tired as the day she met him during the Gotham riots, pulled it open, staring at her.

She pushed past him, shouldering in his apartment which—well, looked decent. A sofa, a television, a kitchen off in the corner, a hallway leading to other rooms. Red carpet, wooden walls.

Less of a mess than she thought it would be, actually.

John shut the door behind her, drawing her attention back to the man of the hour himself.

She wheeled, feeling anger swim at the back of her eyes. “John, sincerely, what the _fuck_ were you doing in a gimp suit?”

He froze, opened his mouth, shut it. He did it again, looking for the words, before opting not to, just sighing. He reached up, scratching at his chin, a nervous tic he’d apparently had since childhood.

“I hoped that wasn’t actually you,” he grumbled, eyes flicking up to meet her own. “Undercover?”

“Don’t dodge the question, Stewart. I swear to god.”

John grunted, turning away and motioning towards one of the plush seats in the living room. He wandered over to the couch opposite the chairs, slumping down into it with a groan. He reached into his pocket, rummaging around before pulling something out, flipping his hand over and opening it, revealing the ring in the center of his palm.

Maggie slowly lowered herself into the recliner, staring at it.

“It... found me,” he said, hoarsely.

She said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

“I came to National City for a clean break,” he started, finally looking back up to her. “After my military service and acting as a member of the national guard? My faith—well, you know. I told you about it, drinking buddies and all that. I was pretty gutted by the system.

“You probably won’t believe it, but I came out here to study architecture. Never thought I’d get the chance, it’d been a passion in my childhood, but architects are one of those jobs only rich people get. Impoverished, poor black kids? Not so much, but I was paid in money I bled for, so I could do with it what I wanted.” He shut his hand, the ring vanishing back beneath the clench of his fingers. “When Fort Rozz crashed, I was near it. Studying out of a local cafe. I... I went into autopilot, I just wanted to help people out there. There were aliens on the ground, _people_ on the ground, hurt. It was when I was trying to dig someone out, I thought they were alive, but they weren’t, that I... came across this weird box. It’d fallen out of the ship, a black cylinder-looking thing. When I touched it, it open, and... this thing flew up to me, said I had been chosen to serve, and asked if I was willing.”

“So you took it,” Maggie said, dubiously. “A random piece of alien technology.”

“I wanted to _help_ ,” John stressed, looking across from her. “But, that’s... not the point. The ring was already at 100% charge, but when it was teaching me to use it, it mentioned a lantern. It’d somehow gotten separated from the lantern, and... I wanted to find it, because it’d be helpful to have, you know? The ring can track the signature the lantern gives off, but it’s like a trail, not GPS location. I’ve been following the trail it left ever since. I thought I found it tonight, but, well, I suppose not.”

“...Why, John?” she asked, because she didn’t _know_ why. “You were so tired about the violence, the shit you went through, all of that. Why go running back into the arms of something like this? You’re dealing with a lot of power, you didn’t have to.”

John looked at her, really did. He reached up to rub his eyes, shoulders slumped. “I always wanted to help, Mags. I wanted to help with my whole _damn_ heart for my entire life but each time I tried, I just learned nobody else did. The military wanted me because I could kill people, the police wanted me because I had guns they didn’t. I never got a chance, with those systems, to help even a single god _damn_ soul. My tours? I bet I’ve done more bad than good, in them, and I was ashamed of that.”

“Are you sure you can manage that with this? Do you even know what you’re getting into?”

“...Honestly?” John looked her way again. “Not really. I know the abstract, but... well. The world’s at risk, it’s not like I can just turn the duty down.”

...What. “What.”

He blinked at her, long and slow. “My ring can communicate between sectors, but because we’re out of the way it’s limited, I get things delayed, and only big news reports. I’ve picked up on some things, and learned a whole lot more, and, well...”

He slipped the ring on, a shimmer of light playing over his hand. He reached out, and from the flat head of the ring, an image was projected. It was still the same green of the energy, but intricate, and slightly staticky. On it, a vast fleet, dominated by a single huge mothership, slowly crawled through space.

“This is the Daxamite war fleet,” he explained, voice a bit flat. “All that remains of their race. They call it the Daxamite death march, because they hit any planet in their way and strip it of people for slaves and more ships.”

Maggie stared at it, confused. “If this is so far out, how does it have anything to do with Earth?”

“...Well, they’re on their way here,” John supplied, looking at her, face twisted into something grim. “All the chatter about this is about how the Daxamites want to track down the last remaining Kryptonians, the people they think are responsible for killing their people and demolishing their planet. This comes with a universal translator, you know? I... can sorta read the symbol on Superman and Supergirl’s chest, that and the ring knows about the House of El.”

“But that doesn’t mean they’re coming here,” Maggie stressed, still looking at the fleet.

“No, if they were just... looking for Earth, I’d agree. But, well, they’re pointed straight as us Mags.” The image drew back, the fleet becoming a tiny speck, then a dot on a larger intergalactic map. A dotted line pointed out from them, skating past Alpha Centauri, among other clusters of alien life, pointed directly at their solar system. “I think they already know, and it’s just a matter of time until they get here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delayed update. My schedule for the week went completely to shit last-second and I had to write this today rather than yesterday.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. I made the mistake of shoving a lot of the plot hooks for the later arcs of this season into one entire damn chapter, an interlude no less, with a character who is fairly different to Addy.
> 
> I regret everything. Enjoy 13 thousand words.


	43. SEASON 2 - EPISODE 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addy goes back to work.

There were many things, Addy knew, that she did not yet understand about this universe.

It would be incorrect - and more to the point, irresponsible - to map it to the same logic of the one she had come from. Even minute changes to the underlying fabric of reality could have cascading impacts well beyond it. The butterfly effect, but magnified to a cosmic scale, and as far as she had been able to figure out, the changes that defined this universe from her last were not _minor_.

She had, for the most part, a fairly decent grasp on the universe and the logic it worked under. One still with holes, certainly, but holes that could be patched over and understood with further research and study as more of its secrets became clear to her.

Take, as an example, emotional energy.

Addy was first and foremost more than willing to admit she had thought it was another example of those obnoxious holes in her understanding, when she had first theorized it back when Barry Allen visited, defying all common understandings of interdimensional travel in his explanation, and thoroughly uprooting her sense of security and intelligence.

Not that she was bitter. She most certainly was not, the fact would’ve had to have been raised to her _eventually_ , and better it be the unimpressive, fickle scientist than a person she actually cared about.

Back to the point, however. When she had first theorized of its existence, she had assumed - rightfully so - that she was just getting something wrong, in much the same way one realizes their theory for everything is wrong when it starts spitting infinities out in response to basic simulations. If you’ve reached the point where infinity is the common denominator in your understanding of physics, you’ve likely failed to carry the one several times, and the same could be extended to something like emotional energy.

Yet, as far as her own two eyes - and a suite of sensory functions, anyway - could be sure, it apparently existed.

The night before had been a period of great revelations. For starters, Earth’s conception of ‘formal wear’ was as tired as it was uninspired, and she liked precisely none of it. Secondarily, despite her being forced to choose the tamest outfit with as much colour as the D.E.O. base, those with too much wealth and too little sense still saw it as ‘brave’ and whatever _metrosexual_ meant, something she had judiciously avoided looking up, if only for her own mental stability. That something so timid and tepid in colour scheme could be _interesting_ to them was completely beyond her, but she digressed.

No, the only real interesting part of the night - outside of reaffirming her belief nobody understood fashion and were all just pretending - had been that emotional energy did, in fact, exist, and it felt quite literally like nothing she had ever sensed before. She’d felt it in the bare few seconds before the man in question - a “Green Lantern” - had blasted down the wall with a spear made from literal willpower.

How? She still didn’t know. It had distracted her enough after sensing it that she hadn’t even remembered to ask questions or clarification at the debriefing, too caught up in the fact that her capacity to sense energy had sensed something which felt a whole lot like a distilled emotion. Which, as it happened, shouldn’t be possible, as her energy sensors in her coreself and the feelers she had been using to send readings back to it had no real conception of emotion.

It was quite literally as much of a mystery to her as it was to everyone else, apparently.

Which, this raised another worrying point. Rather than having gaps in her knowledge, her analysis had been so correct that she’d theorized the existence of a spectrum of emotion-based energy, which in turn meant said emotions might exist as some kind of universal constant. This, again, raised some _severe_ questions about the universe, as emotions were, as a rule, never absolute, at least not in her experience. Rather, emotions were terribly relative; humans had happiness, and the Ghora had ik’nitat, and neither of them would mean a lick of sense to the other, even if both were what could be considered to be the “good” emotion.

If this universe had wavelengths of energy derived from absolute emotional ranges, it likely meant that most species either had them, or would be innately predisposed towards getting them, or at least something closely approximating them. Which, in turn, implied that something outside of cancer or cessation of complexity could be a universal constant, and something as abstracted and fundamentally relative as emotions at that.

Addy had been, this entire time, assuming she was either impossibly lucky or a victim of severe selection bias when it came to how similar alien emotion ranges were to humans, and vice-versa. The latter had been her going theory, as it would make sense for aliens to not hang around people with fundamentally incomprehensible emotional states, and would likely lead to wars, and a lot of them.

But, apparently not. It was very likely that all aliens at least had some of the human emotional range, and it wasn’t so much a selection bias as it seemed to be literal _intelligent design_. This, in turn, might explain why all aliens tended to look so uniform and similar, as for all that bipedalism was certainly not unique to earth, the exact combination of physiological features generally were.

But that itself pointed to a source of said intelligent design, which she was still not entirely sold on. Her species had more or less debunked the existence of intelligent design sometime around the fourth planet they cannibalized. There was no universal guiding hand to help encourage the creation of intelligent life with exactly the right tools to manipulate objects and develop from basic stone tools and onward. It was just that aliens found unique ways to arrive at those points all on their own, or utilized qualities unique to their planet to arrive at similar places to other species if they might, say, lack thumbs and therefore render most tools nearly impossible to use.

The same could not be said for this universe, however. It was either someone’s idea of a cosmic joke or there was something much more going on than she’d been made privy to as of this time. It made her wonder if there was some sort of universal _font_ of life, a source of energy or something like it that was interfering with the process of evolution, tweaking it to its desired ends. It might explain some of the x-gene weirdness she had noticed, though not much else.

Which, hence her running internal dialogue on the matter. There was something profoundly purposefully _designed_ about all of this, and she was starting to get annoyed. It was one thing for the universe to be that way on its own, where a type of selection bias made it so that if the universe _didn’t_ have the exact specifics to encourage the formation of planets and stars, there would be nobody there to note it, and therefore the fact that they existed was itself more of a thing of chance.

Or, at least that’s how far her species had gotten on the matter. That was among some of the few things no amount of study or cannibalized knowledge could really give context for. There were always some theories, of course, like that black holes were really the creation of a new universe - _unlikely_ , but then the thought experiment was certainly interesting - and—

A cup was placed down on the table in front of her, yanking her completely from her thoughts.

Addy blinked, tried to recapture whatever thread of internal conversation she was going through, but ultimately abandoned it. She’d have time, later, to mull over the existence of the universe and the fact that she may be an unfortunate toy in someone’s unpleasant idea of a sandbox.

She panned her eyes up, away from the grains of wood on the table, and towards the bar at large. It was fairly late, and there weren’t many people around tonight. Carol was settling down into the seat across from her, handing another cup topped to the brim with ice off to Koriand’r, who was sitting to Addy's right. Megan was back at the bar still, talking quietly with a finned alien wearing what looked to be a fishbowl for some reason.

Carol glanced between their two cups, face twisting into a bit of a grimace. “I still can’t believe your weird ice chewing habit is spreading,” she groused, though there wasn’t much heat to her voice. Addy had learned that Carol could complain about just about anything, given the impetus.

“I have come around to, as Addy may call it, the _crunch_ ,” Koriand’r explained, fishing a shard of ice out from her cup and jamming it between her teeth. Her jaw grit, tensed, and then shattered it utterly with a loud _crack_.

Carol looked faintly unnerved by the display, reaching out for her cup of what Addy believed was some kind of malt whiskey.

Reaching towards her own cup, she brought it to her lips and tilted it back, letting a scattered handful of shards deposit themselves in her mouth. She caught most of them on her teeth, and the ones she didn’t melted quickly against her tongue, trickling cold water down her throat.

Carol’s eyes turned to her, this time, as she lifted her own cup to her mouth, taking small sips. “You’ve been quiet, Addy,” she commented.

Which was true. In the day since the trip to Roulette’s gun show and the revelation that emotional energy was not an error in her calculations, she had been quiet and as contemplative as she could reasonably manage. It was one thing to have a theoretical grasp on how different one universe may be to the one you had been hand-crafted to ruthlessly exploit, it was another to realize how different it _was_.

It didn’t help that this had brought back into stark contrast her own problem—her inability to _grow_ ; to use her powers as she wanted to without running the risk of burning out what little of her continued existence she had left.

Chewing until the ice was mostly slush, she swallowed the contents back, ignoring Carol’s accompanying grimace at the noise. “I was merely thinking to myself,” she clarified.

Carol nodded slowly, as if afraid any sudden movements might scare her off. “I’m... assuming that’s a good thing?”

Addy’s face pinched into a frown. Of course it was?

Carol raised her hands in surrender. “Wrong way to put it,” she clarified, which, alright, fair enough. “Just sometimes you can overthink things, I should know, it’s... uh, a habit for me.”

“Overthinking is a myth,” she muttered, feeling more than a little defensive.

Evidently finally seeing the argument as unwinnable - as it always was - Carol just shrugged, taking a rather large swig from her cup.

The energy, it had read as distilled willpower given energetic shape - which, again, she _didn’t understand how_ , her energy sensors didn’t have the capacity to qualify such a thing, but they had, so she didn’t know what else to think of it - but she still wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just all a dupe. It was certainly a new type of energy, something she had never even remotely sensed, and that made her _itch_. It made old instincts she thought fairly long-dead igniting to dissect and learn.

Was it truly based on those emotions? Or was it doing the same thing _her_ kind did, in that they obfuscated the artificiality of the abilities they gave out by keying it to certain things?

An example of that in practice was, in fact, Lung. One of Taylor’s earliest conquests, and by far one of Addy’s favourites to revisit. Lung’s power was transformative, growing him in size and strength, while also granting him secondary pyrokinetic abilities. From Taylor’s memories, she could recall people had thought up any number of explanations for how his transformation worked, and why it scaled with conflict. From hormones kick-starting the process, to adrenaline and more.

That was all lies. A clever obfuscation by the shard to hide the fact that the restriction was fundamentally artificial. Had his shard been without any _expected_ limiters, Lung could have grown whenever he wanted, as fast as he wanted, and as far as he wanted, with no upper limit. In fact, she was fairly sure mangling the connection node they’d grown in their hosts' brains would’ve had that effect _anyway_.

Lung’s shard, as noisy and loud as it was, certainly didn’t seem to be the type of shard to carefully coordinate how the corona pollentia actually worked, in any event. Subtlety was something some shards excelled at, such as herself, for others, it went out the window as soon as they grew tired of it.

Really. Just look at Broadcast. As unsubtle as its function, she supposed.

Still, to return to her point, it could be that it was all a ruse, that those rings weren’t actually powered by emotions, and instead emotions were being used as a clever shorthand to obfuscate the fact that it was all artificial. It... well, wouldn’t explain the fact that emotional energy probably _did_ exist, but still, she had to keep her cards on the table.

She wouldn’t trust whatever made them anyway.

Addy scooped down another bit of ice, glancing off to the side.

Speaking of sources, if she actually wanted to get anywhere, and potentially get her energy reserves back up, she had to start finding sources of power, and a way to transfer it. Even with all of her new knowledge on this universe, she had come no closer to understanding how Barry Allen had managed to transport himself between alternative universes, and she was fairly certain he was a hack or being loudly lied to. Possibly both.

Her kind had been more or less _born_ into split universes, on their planet of gray slime that passed through temporal and spatial anomalies. It was hideously embarrassing to be so handicapped, the other shards would’ve terminated her in a heartbeat, had they known how far she’d fallen. She had once controlled infinitely overlapping fragments of a whole, travelling in unison at the same time in multiple universes, and here she was, struggling to find a way to do even the bare basics her species had been known for.

It was shameful, and it couldn’t stay that way if she wanted to get anywhere.

That said, she did have to start _somewhere_ , and since her breaching simulations had come up dry, her next best option was finding and hoarding as much energy as she could so that she could unceremoniously dump it into herself the second she figured out the interdimensional energy transfer problem.

Turning her focus back to Carol and Koriand’r, Addy rolled through the few potential sources she’d been giving thought to. They probably wouldn’t know anything about solar array harvesting, which was a shame, but understandable. “Would any of you happen to know of an omegahedron?” she asked, blunt as she could manage. It generally was easier to get to the point of this sort of thing. “Or heard any rumours about one?”

She was rewarded with twin blank stares.

“A... what?” Koriand’r hedged, sounding uncertain.

“Omegahedron,” Addy clarified. “A powerful, portable energy source that was in Fort Rozz, but has since gone missing after its crash. You were there when I brought two of them together to disrupt it.”

Clarity came back to Koriand’r eyes, and she shrugged. “Though they both got turned to dust in the blastwave.”

“Omegahedrons don’t break that easily,” Carol said, distractedly. “Not unless they’re badly made—I guess. Which, no, I haven’t heard any rumours about it. That said...” Carol looked behind her, towards Megan. “Megan might have a clue, she is the bartender, after all.”

Valid point.

Apparently gaining awareness that they were all looking at her, Megan glanced up from the dish she was cleaning and smiled in their direction. Addy raised her hand, wiggled her fingers in a beckon.

Megan paused, said something to the man beside her, and was waved off. She tucked the dish back into the sink, wiped her hands down on a towel, and navigated around the bar and in their direction, looking at the three of them curiously.

Megan was one of the people Addy liked the most, but was hesitant to do so. She was quiet, she understood boundaries, she had a wonderful voice, and her hair was very nice as well. She hung around them when she was off work, but Addy knew very little about her. Megan and Carol seemed to be long-time friends, but that was exclusive to them.

“What can I do you guys for?” Megan asked, once she’d made it close enough that she wouldn’t have to yell.

“Have you heard any rumours about the omegahedron?” Addy supplied, just as blunt as before.

Megan blinked, long and slow. “I... thought this was for more drinks,” she said, not unkindly.

“I might need another one, give it some time,” Carol grunted.

The three of them ignored her.

“But I have heard a few things?” Megan said, tilting her head to the side as she gave the question more of a thought. “A lot of people have been asking about it, and people are noticing it's gone missing, but I don’t really have much more to tell you. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Addy replied, because it _was_. She hadn’t expected to randomly stumble onto the object out of luck or something of the sort. That and she could hardly expect a bartender to know the ins-and-outs of what could potentially be a highly valuable object being smuggled out of state, which was her best bet at this point.

Megan smiled, went to turn away, only for the door to the bar to open. She glanced back, her mouth opening to say some kind of greeting, only for her body to freeze.

Addy followed her eyes, and found herself looking at, of all people, J’onn.

Not to say that J’onn was out of place in a bar, just that Al’s was the bar you went to when the other bars didn’t want you, and the liquor store refused to let you in. It wasn’t the sort of respectable speakeasy that J’onn would actually seem in place in.

But here he was, not even looking at her as he strode towards Megan, a tight, almost hopeful look on his face. His hands were in his pockets, and while his posture might’ve seemed relaxed, he moved a bit too stiffly for it to be the truth.

“I believe,” J’onn started, voice low. “That we have to talk.”

“How... did—” Megan opened her mouth, shut it, and sighed. “Let me get someone to cover my shift?”

J’onn just nodded. “I’ll be waiting outside.”

Megan turned to them, mouthed an apology, and left, moving back towards the bar, where she was waving down her coworker. J’onn by comparison was already leaving, having still avoided looking at her.

“I wonder if they’re related?” Carol said, a bit curious.

Addy blinked, jolted. “But Megan’s a human.”

Carol stared at her, almost vacant. “No, she isn’t. She’s a Martian, like your boss.”

What.

Sure, she hadn’t _checked_ , because it had never seemed all that necessary. Nothing about Megan had felt particularly off or alien, so she’d just... opted not to. She had to stop doing that, assumptions were going to be the death of her at this rate, perhaps literally. “I never noticed.”

“Easy to forget that you aren’t consciously aware of your power at all times,” Carol mused, tucking a hand under her chin.

“It’s cost inefficient,” Addy explained, because she was feeling rather judged at this point. “Having it on perpetually would be a distraction, and it would drain me.”

Carol just grunted, glancing over her shoulder as Megan walked out through the back door, wearing her jacket. “I don’t have any idea how awkward _that_ is going to be,” she said, glib. “Thank fuck nobody knows I’m alive on Titan.”

Addy had no idea how to respond to that.

* * *

“Thank you all for returning,” Lena was saying, standing on the stage. She was next to a microphone, wearing rather drab, black business wear, with a loose smile on her face. “I know that it wasn’t easy, not after the bomb.”

There was some soft clapping, people shuffling in place around her. Addy had never been a fan of crowds not immediately under her control, regardless of the demographic, and being stuck nearly in the dead middle of one was not her idea of a good time. At this point, she just wanted it to end.

They were in a theatre-like room in the L-Corp building, a meeting area for all of the staff. It was a few floors above the labs, labs which had apparently been upgraded in the interim, now that Lena had the chance to spend some money without something like a time schedule to get in the way of things.

Not that she had been down to see it yet, no. She’d spent the morning getting her new lanyard and keycard - now labelling her a member of the _xenotechnology research team_ \- and then the rest of it had been spent here, packed in among throngs of people, listening to Lena talk.

Emil, June and Serling were arrayed around her, also tucked away into seats. Emil was looking fondly up at Lena, while June was watching quietly and Serling had at some point decided this was all below her and had since pulled out her laptop to play... what seemed like a voxel-based video game about blowing things up.

“Hopefully,” Lena’s voice continued, drawing her attention back to the woman herself. “This quarter will have fewer explosions, or at least fewer ones not related to the scientific process, anyway.” The last few words were wry, accompanied by a bit of a wink and a smile.

Laughter chorused out from the crowd, mostly from the research teams, and not for the first time Addy wondered just how weird their team actually was. Did Lena just mainly hire people like this? What went into the L-Corp recruitment manifesto? She wanted to know, if only to figure out if they were an outlier or a prototypical example of an employee for the company.

“Going forward, we’ll be getting the security measures upgraded again in about six weeks, as well as including some new counterterrorism aids as developed in-house. Our goal for this quarter is to make it through without any incident similar to the one we had before, and with that in mind, your safety is my main priority. That said, of course, we will still be working on existing projects, and we will be renewing the robot building competition this year around, as a way to hopefully encourage company unity, so as it stands, when you go back to work, you’ll be keeping on the same track, just with more safety.”

Whether it was the mention of robot building, safety, or security measures, something in what Lena said drew Serling’s gaze up from her computer, which she shut in her lap. Emil was staring at her, exasperated, and June didn’t even so much as twitch at the change in focus.

“More to the point, to help reassert that we’re still around, we’ll be going ahead with several research publications,” Lena explained, a chorus of cheering erupting from one half of the room. She gave the group a put-upon, exasperated look. “Yes, I know, you’ve been waiting for three years to get it out there, Jocelyn, but please, hold the parade back until after I’m done?”

The group simmered down, a woman in it looking suitably embarrassed.

“Speaking of,” Lena continued, waving her hands out. “This ends the welcome back speech. I hope—”

More cheering, this time led by the woman who had looked utterly cowed just a few seconds ago. People were already shuffling to a stand, gathering their things.

“Sometimes I feel like a teacher in a middle school,” Lena groused, though the smile on her face never twitched. “Either way, today is to be a no-stress day. Get to know your spaces again, as some of them have changed, and don’t rush into work. Get used to the dynamics again, and go from there. Have a good day, everyone, and welcome back to L-Corp.”

There was some more clapping and chattering as people finally started to rise from their seats in bulk. Emil and June were on their feet, while Serling was attempting to stuff her laptop away in her bag.

Addy’s eyes were mostly on Lena though. Lena was looking at her, indicating with a soft wave of her hand that she should come over.

“I’ll be with the rest of you in a moment,” Addy explained, turning towards them.

Emil glanced from her, to Lena, and then back again.

“Don’t get fired, please,” Serling blurted, staring at her. “You’re one of the only people who gets my artistry.”

Addy really didn’t, she was just good at pretending to. You learn how to do that, considering her kin.

Turning away without comment, she tucked her bag back up over her shoulder and wandered through the throng of eager scientists and researchers. They made room for her as she went, people quickly rearranging themselves to leave through the various exits as soon as possible. 

The crowd had spilled mostly away by the time she arrived at the stage. Above her, Lena was taking large drinks from a plastic bottle of water, draining the entire thing in no more than a few seconds. She broke the seal between her lips and the rim, and tossed the thing into a waste bin just next to the podium and mic she’d been speaking from, finally turning her attention wholly onto Addy.

“Thank you for waiting for me, Addy,” Lena said, at last, taking the stairs down from the stage in pairs. Addy wasn’t sure how she did it, considering the absurdly high heels, but then a lot of things didn’t make sense when it came to footwear for women. Waving her forward, Lena started walking towards one of the exits near the back of the stage.

Addy dutifully followed, passing into the hallway as she went. It was largely abandoned, only a few people hanging around, and even those quickly fell out of sight as Lena led her around another corner in relative silence, right up to an elevator Addy hadn’t known was there. A swipe of her card, and it opened for them, allowing them inside.

“I wanted to apologize,” Lena said, at last, jabbing her thumb into one of the buttons. It lit up, and the doors began to close. “For how I’ve been acting.”

Addy startled, glanced in her direction.

The elevator started to ascend, silent.

“I should have... spoken to you earlier, without all of this anticipation muddying things,” Lena explained, voice neutral and still, unwilling to give anything away.

As a consequence, Addy didn’t really know what to say. So she didn’t say anything, it seemed to be the safest option at this point.

“I did to you what I blame others for doing to me,” she continued, quiet. “I judged you based on appearances, on names, on...”

Her eyes jumped to her, scanned across her person. Her face set almost into a frown, looking guilty.

“On families and blood.”

Ah. So Lena not knowing that she was an alien was completely out of the window at this point. That was fairly valid, she had no expectation it wouldn’t remain that way, but nonetheless.

The elevator dinged, doors peeling open as Lena stepped out in front of her. Addy kept up pace behind her, wandering through largely unfamiliar corridors until, after a sharp left turn, they emerged out into the hallway leading towards Lena’s office. Jess was standing where she normally did, behind a desk, smiling awkwardly at the two of them.

Addy waved with her fingers, and got a wave back in return.

Arriving at Lena’s office, Lena bypassed the couches and wandered right up to her desk, settling down in the black-leather seat behind it. She sighed, rubbing at her brows.

Addy wandered up to the front of the desk, taking a seat in the rather comfortable-looking, squarish white leather chair that had been left there.

“You were right,” Lena said, after another breath of silence.

Which, she generally was. But she didn’t know about what, explicitly, this time around.

“I took your... _ideas_ ,” Lena began, eyes reopening, her hands tangling together in front of her, resting against her desk. “Started doing my own preliminary research and looked into what you said about potential threats to aliens. After that set off some red flags, I reached out to professionals, who reaffirmed it. You were completely and utterly right that the device would put aliens at a disproportionate amount of risk, encourage an atmosphere of exclusion, set a precedent for something like that being able to detect whether or not someone was human, regardless of if it was true, and that it would brand L-Corp as merely an extension of Luthor-Corp’s xenophobia and racism.

“But that only took me a few days,” Lena stressed, shutting her eyes as one hand came up to rub against her eyelids. “I... have no real excuse for ignoring you for this long. You have been nothing but accommodating despite what I exposed to you, and you’ve been endlessly polite in helping me. You could have been much ruder, and felt much more betrayed, and that would’ve been completely normal.”

Addy opened her mouth, wanting to point out that she wasn’t _that_ upset, just, you know, cautious about handing out technology like that in this sort of atmosphere if she didn’t want it to be used for certain ends, but Lena stopped her with a raised hand.

“So I got rid of the technology,” Lena explained, honest. “Every prototype, every blueprint, every bit of research is gone. Completely. No recovery possible.”

Addy wasn’t so sure about doing something like _that_ , though? That seemed really wasteful.

Apparently seeing that question on her face, Lena continued. “It’s safer this way. Part of my silence was that, as you said, the second I started floating this idea, I suddenly had several staff members who, until now, I had trusted to be decent people, come out of the woodwork to... encourage me. They began behaving in ways that implied they thought something of _me_ that I wasn’t, and intended to use the device for hostile ends. As it would turn out, my brother’s influence still has roots in the company, though as it stands not much more of them, as everyone involved in that has since been fired and is currently being escorted off of company property as we speak.”

Okay, now that was something Addy more approved of.

“I couldn’t risk any of them getting their hands on even partial information on the device, not if they could recreate it, which they could. So, again, allow me to say, thank you, Addy. You’ve done... something very good for me, turned me away from a path I might not have noticed I was walking down. I responded to it with judgement and silence, and... well—”

Lena shrugged, a helpless, almost shy gesture. It looked rather odd on a woman who tended to hide behind her confidence as a shield.

“I... want to start over,” she finished, quietly.

“We don’t have to start over,” Addy pointed out. “I’m not really mad at you, I just wished to let you know that there were problems. I never doubted you.”

Lena shook her head at that, though the corners of her mouth ticked up nonetheless. “No, no. I’ve been both underestimating you and infantilizing you. I want to make this right.” She rose, peeling a few pages off of her desk, and circling around to Addy, extending them out towards her.

Addy took them, glancing down at the pair of tickets.

“This is for my gala,” Lena explained. “It’s L-Corp related, and I was... hoping it could be a good place to rebuild bridges. You’re invited, with a +1, and...” Another moment of hesitation, she fidgeted, biting her lower lip. “I was wondering if you could ask Kara, as I want to apologize to her as well. She tried to raise similar complaints to me, but since they were—well, arguments on ethics, I ignored her, and that was unfair of me.”

Addy blinked, long and slow, gave the entire thing the thought it necessitated.

“Okay.”

Lena jolted a bit. “Okay?”

Addy nodded. “If this is what you feel you need to do to re-establish a relationship, then okay, I will ask.”

Softness creased across Lena’s face, a smile pulling wider at her lips—

“That said,” Addy interrupted. “I think it’s completely redundant and unnecessary whether or not you apologize to Kara at a gala or over the phone, as she is not the sort of person to require something like a fancy event to feel better, and that you may be getting the wrong impression on who she is as a person, but if this is what you need—”

For whatever reason, her well-thought-out explanation was rewarded with a laugh. A low, dry chuckle in her chest, cheeks a bit coloured, as Lena stepped away and back behind her desk. “Okay, okay,” her voice was humorous, laughter still escaping her in soft chuckles. “Alright Addy, I will talk to Kara _on the phone_ too—but this is more of a treat for her.”

Addy stared down at the tickets, felt a bit of a grimace start to build on one side of her face at the sight of it being formal wear only. “I am not so sure I would qualify being dressed up as a treat,” she said, dubious.

Lena made an undignified, utterly unflattering _snort_. “I won’t disagree with that, but for some people, this is a very special occasion. I want to do it right.”

Addy shrugged, still not really getting it. If someone wanted to apologize to her, they merely should say so, and possibly give her a few things she enjoyed. Geese, crystals, the like.

“Either way,” Lena said at last, leaning back in her chair. “You may return to work now—we both have our jobs to do, right?” There was a hopeful note there, a slight lilt in her voice.

Addy opened her mouth, shut it, and then nodded.

Yes, she should probably get back to work. It was her job, after all.

* * *

“I sure am glad you’re not leaving us or anything, I was absolutely _convinced_ you were going to be fired or quit.”

Addy stared at the blast window in front of her, her black box field generator tucked beneath a table, on top of which was an action-figure-like children’s toy. It was a small, bipedal robotic figure, with glowing joints made from pure energy, and that could respond to basic verbal commands and do things like spout off lines in a language none of them spoke.

She was starting to get the impression a lot of things were universal. Action figures, emotions, children. She wondered what would be the next universal constant, hopefully it might be something like ‘birds’, as she had already heard of several aliens who had birdlike species. More birds were, in her opinion, always a good thing.

“Serling, not everyone is as bad as you,” Emil said, chastising. He was next to the new terminal, not the old bodged-together one, fiddling with the settings on her black box field generator.

“ _Not everyone’s as good as me_ ,” Serling muttered.

June patted her on the shoulder, even as Serling glared mutinously at her.

“Alright,” Emil interrupted, stepping away a few paces. “We are now testing Addy’s version of the black box field generator.” He sounded rather done with Serling’s antics, not that it was hard to imagine how he could arrive at that point.

Emil’s black box field generator hadn’t quite managed to short out the toy. Cause it to horrifically start screaming? Yeah, it did that, and Serling had needled him endlessly about it, but not much more than that. Hers, being the most refined out of them, was next up, with Serling and June, respectively, coming after.

Emil tapped the touchscreen, starting a delayed countdown as he quickly adjusted a few minor variables.

Addy watched it tick down, from fifteen, to ten, then five, four, three, two...

There was a low hum, a whoomph. Inside of the testing range, hidden behind the blast window, the toy began to shudder as her black box field generator kicked into activity. They’d programmed it to walk in circles through figuring out a few basic words of the language it was programmed with - as it was a learning aid, after all, as far as they could tell - and now it was wobbling, unable to keep a constant pace.

The robotic humanoid tripped, after another few paces, fell facedown, and promptly sparked wildly. The glowing joints fizzled, popping, sparks flying everywhere as it started to seize and spasm, writhing around on the table before, with a final bright jolt from the glowing joints, fell to pieces, the energy no longer there to connect them.

There was a pause, waiting for something else to happen, before Emil tapped on the screen again and got her black box to shut down. After another few seconds, the energy in the toy coalesced, parts snapping back into place as the robot rather frankly picked itself up and started walking in circles again.

June made a noise of success, a low cheer in the back of her throat, while Emil smiled broadly at the sight of it.

“I preferred it when everything exploded,” Serling said sourly.

“I could make it explode, I believe,” Addy said, at last, turning to look at her. “It suppresses and disperses the energy, if I made it much more—”

Emil made a noise in the back of his throat. “We aren’t doing that. Good job, it seems like your box is the prototype we’re going to be going with, Addy.”

She looked back at him, nodded once.

Emil tapped on the terminal as a list of readings from the interior started pouring across the screen. He clicked his tongue. “Disrupted the energy, but it took nearly five times as much to do it. That’s... not good.”

“How much is five times, in this case?” June asked, curious.

“Enough to put a noticeable spike in power usage for the building,” Emil said. “In other words, too much to be usable outside of places with access to this amount of energy, let alone multiple uses of it at once. I feel almost bad for the environment, looking at this read-out. We’re going to need to bring the energy it uses _way_ down, if we want these to be usable.”

She’d never been that good at energy conservation, but hearing that said directly to her face still hurt a little. She didn’t comment, otherwise, though.

Emil pulled his phone out. “About time for lunch too, at that. We’ll do Serling’s and June’s boxes after, alright?”

Serling was already wandering off, back towards the table where she’d left her bag, June nodding towards the two of them as she followed after.

Emil turned to look directly at her, hesitating. He stepped forward, not quite into her personal space, but close enough that it felt a little _too_ intimate. “Addy, seriously, this was good work. You’ve come far since you first arrived, and we’ve just made a huge breakthrough on our major project. Serling will undoubtedly get really happy when she gets over nothing exploding as she wanted it to, and June’s a quiet person.”

Addy opened her mouth, paused, shut it. “Thanks,” she mumbled, not sure what else to say.

Emil smiled, fond. “I’m glad you’re on the team, and that you didn’t leave, too.”

She scratched at the back of her own neck, refusing to look at him. Affection from other people was _weird_. Emotions were weird, weird enough that this universe had codified them. But she got his meaning.

“Anyway, speaking of, what did you guys get up to?” Serling said, having somehow unearthed a small pile of twinkies from her bag. “I’ll have you know, I did some _kickass_ fuckin’ work with the feds. I got paid to blow shit up, and it wasn’t ‘blowing shit up’ like drone engineers. I bet none of you are that cool.”

June turned to look at her. “I kinda wondered if that was your axe.”

“Hell yeah it was. Fuckin’ Mjolnir, or the Electricutioner, as I prefer to call her.”

...Her? Could people gender technology? She almost opened her mouth to ask as much, before reconsidering it.

Actually, she didn’t want to know.

* * *

Peeling off her coat, Addy was more than a little happy to be home. Not that she didn’t enjoy work, or watching Serling’s generator go up in literal flames within five seconds of activation, but today had been intense. Intense in a way that had left her tired. From people telling her how important she was, to the talk with Lena, to June and her being apparently shocked that Addy had managed to make it tell geese and ducks apart.

It was just a lot. And she was happy she could take a rest.

Kara was already home, typing away at her laptop on the couch while the television aired what appeared to be Dr. House MD.

Fishing the pair of tickets out of her pocket, Addy stared at them. She considered, _really_ gave it a lot of thought, if she wanted to go to the gala. No, she didn’t, at all, but if she did, Kara _and_ Lena would be happy, and that was something she wanted almost as much as she wanted to avoid having to do it in the first place.

Kicking her shoes off, she made her decision. She’d endure stuffy clothing if it meant a better chance at reconciliation, and so that she would feel less like she was stuck in the middle between two people who wanted to like one another but had stubbornly decided to do the opposite.

Kara glanced up at her as she approached, blinking. “Oh, hey Ads. Sorry, I'm a bit caught up in writing, right now.”

Addy tilted her head to the side, got a glimpse of three paragraphs worth of reporting on Roulette’s gun show before she looked back away.

“Oh!” Kara blurted, sounding startled. “Lena called!” A genuine smile twitched across her face, broadening into a big, happy grin. “She apologized for the device, which was super nice, _and_ she asked me to reach out to Supergirl, or well, myself, but _y’know_ , because she wants to make sure this new gang with alien tech doesn’t hit her upcoming party like they've been hitting other high-visibility targets. Can you imagine it? A Luthor, asking for a super! This... could be a big change, I’m really excited, and—”

Addy handed her the tickets, wordlessly.

Kara stared down at them, cogs whirring. “...and if I also don’t go as Kara, she’ll think I don’t want to be her friend,” she finished, somewhat lamely.

Ah, now people understood how she felt about socializing. Wonderful.

Wandering over to the couch opposite to Kara’s, where Saturday still remained, she plopped down onto it, feeling herself get halfway absorbed into the plush. She shut her eyes, wiggling against it, letting the sensory payload wash over her, a soothing texture that helped reorient herself in the present, let the strain she felt from dealing with _emotions_ and _people_ all day begin to drain away.

“Oh god, how am I gonna even do this?” Kara muttered, across from her, evidently swapping places - at least mentally - with her. “I... could hide my suit beneath my clothes? I mean, I have some suits, that could work, but, wouldn’t she notice if I disappeared and Supergirl appeared? I...”

“J’onn,” Addy announced, blurrily. She blinked sluggishly, stared at Kara. “Ask J’onn.”

Kara stared back at her, opened her mouth, then shut it. “...Huh.”

“Or don’t go,” Addy offered, mostly for the sake of it.

“Well—of _course_ not, Addy, a real gala!” She sprung to her feet, suddenly rejuvenated with energy now that she realized she could presumably shove her responsibilities onto another person for the time being. “Golly, it’s—it’s like a dream! A fancy party! I used to go to things like it on Krypton, but I never got the chance on Earth! Of course I’m going to go.”

Yeah, Addy didn’t understand that. Didn’t think she ever really would, either. She snuggled deeper into Saturday, stretching her legs out until they hung over the other arm of the couch.

“Are you listening, Addy?”

“Mrgh.” Words were hard. She was tired. She just wanted to relax with Saturday, not think about the time where she’d have to be dressed up like a badly-designed doll to stand around and let the exceptionally wealthy ask her invasive questions about her sexuality, all because she wasn’t wearing a dress.

“Guess not,” Kara conceded, seeing the logic of her not-words. “But, still! I... yeah, I’ll go ask J’onn! I mean, he’ll want to help me keep my identity a secret, and this does technically qualify as taking up a lead for the alien tech stuff, right?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this chapter is a bit disjointed. Having a bit of writing trouble today, and also I realized retroactively that most of the stuff that was intended to be in this chapter went into Maggie's, meaning its... kinda more about tying up loose ends and preparing for the followup stuff to this. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed.


End file.
